


Under Your Bed Sat The Wolf

by Roadrat



Series: Union [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Eventual Sadstuck, F/M, Gen, Implied Past Rape/Non-Con, M/M, Sadstuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-01
Updated: 2014-04-01
Packaged: 2017-12-16 17:46:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 15
Words: 40,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/864843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Roadrat/pseuds/Roadrat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Your name is John Egbert and you are lying in wait"</p>
<p>John has a nice, stable life in a nice, clean part of the city, with no trolls anywhere near to bother him.  He has a dad who loves him, he has mastered the art of pranking and everything is right.</p>
<p>Until, that is, he meets Karkat Vantas.  Then, John starts to think, starts to realise that maybe his perfect world isn't the idyll he thought it was.  Karkat starts to change things, and John isn't sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.</p>
<p>(Homestuck AU - no sburb.  Trolls are a subjugated race that are treated as little more than objects.  They have very few rights, and a revolution is on its way...)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Halfway Beginning

**Author's Note:**

> So this is my first fic and I hope you enjoy it.

Your name is John Egbert and you are lying in wait.  This in itself isn’t a surprise, you’re always lying in wait around this time in the morning, it’s just become a routine part of your daily schedule.  The surprise (you hope) will come when you unleash possibly the most cunning of cunning pranks on your victim.  You’ve made sure to pick a spot close enough so you can hear everything perfectly but far enough so you can abscond if things get to strife level.  Of course, you haven’t strifed with your dad in years, not since the awkward fumbling steps of your early teens.  But it’s always better to stay careful, and there’s a certain comfort in doing things the same way.

The cunning comes from the sheer simplicity of it all.  It’s a classic with your own special twist mixed in, so obvious no one would expect it.  The bucket is placed just how you want, so that the smallest nudge will send it falling. The door is open to the perfect degree, the morning is just starting and your victim isn’t even awake yet.  Everything is just right.  No one’s ever going to tell you pranking isn’t an art, it totally is.  You are the Da Vinci of pranking.  The Rembrandt, the Picasso, the Dali of pranking, it is you. 

The hallway is drowning in the light of day.  You take to watching the bars of sunlight that come in through the window as they creep slowly onto the floor just to entertain yourself.  It’s a thoughtless exercise. You’re sort of fascinated by the way the day can never stop moving and still seem to stay the same.  It’s like how the dusk comes slowly and all at once. 

A sudden clang, a sploshing sound and a yelp pull you out of your nervous reverie.  There’s a grumble and a sigh and then the sound of your dad’s dadly footsteps as he makes his way down the hall to where you stand.  There’s a certain way dads carry themselves, you think, that makes them instantly recognisable.  A heaviness to their steps and a weight behind their shoulders.  A kind shuffling movement.  A walk that smiles and sighs at the same time.

And there he is in front of you, all tired and groggy and covered in shaving foam.  You begin to snicker when you see him, heedless of the weary look he’s giving you.  Really, it just makes you laugh harder.  The laugh is a rough snorting sound at the back of your throat when you start, bubbling into tinkling giggles and then full of guffawing as he shakes his head and little bits of shaving foam fly from the hair at his temples onto your face.

You fall to the floor, arms wrapped around your chest.  What little hair he has is covered in the goo, poking and curling like white horns from his head.  All he does is gently smile down at you.  “Keeping Nana proud, I see,” he says softly, the same greeting he’s used every morning for God knows how long.  You stifle yourself long enough to look into his deepset eyes with your big, brilliant blue ones and giggle.  “Morning dad!” you say cheerily.

This is the first in a series of bucket related pranks you’re scheduled to unleash on your dad in the next few weeks.  It’s not that you don’t love him, you do, loads and loads, it’s just that it’s the summer now and there aren’t so many chances to prank anyone else.  That’ll probably change when school starts and everyone gets to see each other again, but at the moment you’re stuck at home and it’s just so boring sometimes!  Pranking manages to fill out the tedium with something close to fun.

He gives a slow, affectionate shake of his head and retreats to the bathroom.  The rest of the morning passes the same way hundreds of mornings have before, and the way hundreds of mornings in the future probably will.  Dad cleans the gunk from his face and you spend a good ten minutes just lying on the floor reliving the glorious moment again and again.  Dad grabs his fedora and has his coffee and breakfast cake (there are things you will never understand) while you retire to your bedroom, dicking around on the computer aimlessly.  No one you know is on pesterchum.  The people you associate with tend to prefer the night.

But you’re restless.  You keep fidgeting in your seat, checking your watch every so often only to find that the minute hand has barely moved any more towards twelve since you last looked at it.  Maybe it’s broken, you could swear it’s been stuck on the same damn time for an hour.

Eventually, Dad calls you from downstairs.  You’ve been waiting for this all day.  You know he has his car keys, you know he’s waiting by the door.  Of course he is, today is Wednesday.  It’s shopping day.

* * *

 

You love the marketplace, with all its colours and noise and freedom.  It’s the only place you’re ever really given free reign.  That’s why you always go with Dad when he sets off to do the shopping, because you’re allowed to weave through the disparate strands of people’s lives, watch all the snippets form themselves into one conglomerate mess.

You bound down the stairs and out the door. You don’t check to see if Dad has followed you, you know he’s there, moving in his slow dad way. There’s a quick, twitchy pause while you wait for Dad to beep the car unlocked, and when he does you enter, buckling yourself in and almost bouncing in your seat with excitement.  Through the glass of the windscreen you can see Dad’s face marred by reflection, watching you with resigned amusement as he locks the front door.

Your house is the same as all the other houses on the street, like mirrors have been placed next to yours and reflected the house back a hundred times.  Pretty white facades and picket fences, even grass on every lawn.  This neighbourhood is a middle class dream.  It’s an idyll, a heaven, no abnormals, no strange goings on.  Everything is balanced.  Everything is right.

Dad gets in and starts the car.  It splutters, coughs, starts. You smile up at him. 

The journey is mostly uneventful.  You pass by many of the same, faceless houses, watch people ignore each other as they walk down the pavement.  You chin is nestled comfortably in your hand and you’re staring with glazed eyes out the car window.  It’s only as you near your destination that you see him.

He’s innocuous at first, although something about him doesn’t look right.  His face is cast obliquely down at his shoes, his hands are scrunched into balls in his pockets.  He walks like he could be pounced on at any minute.  A mess of jet black hair hides most of his head, but you can see the grey pallor of the skin on his neck quite clearly.

Oh.  He’s a troll.

You’re passing by at a steady pace, slow enough to see the two guys that pass him by, to see the petulant little smile grow like some sort of fungus on the shorter one’s lips, and watch as he spits directly into the troll’s face.  It makes you cringe back from the window a little and frown.  That’s not right.  Well, they’re people, aren’t they? Okay, well maybe not people, but you’re pretty sure they must have feelings and stuff, because the troll you saw didn’t look happy for the last split second you saw him before being whisked away. 

Dad hasn’t noticed anything.  He’s immovable, paying attention to the road.

Trolls are weird things, some even have horns.  They have weird grey skin and these really sharp teeth and yellow nails and they’re just so… different.  Like walking, talking animals.  You think back to biology class and the explanations they handed out and you accepted without a second thought.  They mutate really fast, something to do with lack of stability in their DNA.  That’s part of the reason they’re not really seen as people.  There’s nothing on Earth that resists change so much as a human being.

So some of them have weird mutations.  You swear you saw one with one red eye and one blue once, but apparently that’s sort of common for trolls of a certain blood type.  It’s the mutants you know you should be afraid of, they’re the ones with all the weird powers, or the abnormal growths or changes to their bodies.  The ones higher up the haemospectrum don’t mutate so much, but they get really angry at small stuff.  They’re dangerous, unstable.  Most trolls are.  So they’re kept out of sight, out of mind.

But they still have feelings.  Something about it all doesn’t seem right.

Blah!  You don’t like thinking about it.  Things are fine as they are.

* * *

 

The sound, the noise, the music of street players; colours of all different kinds burst from fruit stands and clothes stands; new kiosks spill their wares; new people spill their guts.  It’s like the world was turned inside out and placed in the centre of the city.  People are arguing all around; how much did you say that was?  did you hear what Kyle did with Beth?  Snippets of conversation float like ambient hitchhikers to grab a ride in your ears.  Everything comes alive at the marketplace.  Everything is right. 

You’re excited; usually you come here just so you can wander around, eavesdrop on people’s lives, survey the scene in front of you like it’s an exhibit at an aquarium, moving behind plexiglass.  Today, though, you’re on a quest, you have things that need doing. 

You ignore the glass vases being shoved at you on either side, watching the distended reflection of yourself retreat away as excited vendors attack the next potential customer.  Dad is busying himself with Dad stuff, so that gives you time to traverse the crowd, peek into kiosks looking for the perfect present; one of them sells cream pies and it takes all your will to pull yourself away before the plethora of pranking possibilities can take your mind hold.  You have to keep reminding yourself that you’re not here to play around. 

And then you see it.

A pair of obnoxious black aviator shades with mirrored lenses and a plastic frame.  They’re beautifully ironic, or at least you think you are.  You’ve managed to get a better hold on this sort of stuff in the past few years, but you don’t know if you’ve mastered it yet.  Suddenly you’re doubting yourself.  What if he doesn’t like them?  What if they’re just stupid, not ironic.  What if they’re beacons that shout ‘douche’ to the world rather than ‘cool’?  Of course, it may be that they’re both the same thing.  Agh!  This is so confusing!

You shake the thoughts away.  You don’t like thinking about it.  Just buy them and get it over with.  Thinking has always led to bad decisions in your experience; better just to let impulse take control whenever you want to do something.  You ask how much they are and quickly hand over the money.  She gives them to you in a tiny paper bag.

Done.  You spent an hour looking for these things, he better appreciate them.

There’s a hand on your shoulder and you look up into those soft eyes.  “I’m done.  Have you got what you wanted?”

 “Yep!  Pretty much set, Dad.”

 “Alright then. Let’s go, son.”

* * *

 

He’s still there, slumped up against a wall by an alleyway.  You’re in the car again, on your way back home, watching the street ignore you.  The paper bag is cradled lovingly under your arm.  The most he gets is a passive glance in his direction from the humans that walk by, or a fearful shiver down the spines of the few trolls that pass. 

There’s a deep wrench in your gut when you see that he’s bleeding.

 “Dad, stop.” 

Impulse is going to be the death of you one day.

Your dad looks at you, then follows your gaze to the crumpled troll.  A little worried crease appears in his forehead, his mouth begins to fall into a thin set line.  But you’re not a child anymore.  It’s not like it can hurt you.  He.  It’s not like he can hurt you, not all defeated and beaten looking the way he is. 

There are dangerous things out there, but you’re not helpless anymore.  You’re tall and strong now.  You’re almost a man.

 “John, I don’t think – “

 “It’s fine, Dad, just pull over for a second.  Please.”

He hesitates for a moment before nodding slightly and directing the car to the kerb.  The troll looks up slightly, looks like he’s groaning, whether in pain or exasperation you can’t be sure.  Well good, at least he’s not dead. 

God he looks lonely.  You feel a pang of empathy.

The car door opens with a click and you’re buffeted with the sounds of the street, the shuffling feet and occasional whooshing of cars passing and the sound of tired wind usually so muffled on the inside.  You leave the shades inside as your dad makes a move to get out, but you just look back with a smile and shake your head.  You’re not sure why.  Maybe it’s because you don’t want to scare it away.

Him.

You pause as you walk over and let out a long breath through puffed out cheeks.  There are bruises everywhere that clothes don’t cover, his breathing sounds jagged and unhealthy.  When he glances up to you, you can see the puckering of his eye, the lids like obese lips, swollen and bright red.  There’s something odd about that, and the cuts on the side of his face that leak blood onto the floor so it swirls and curls like the footsteps of dancers on the sidewalk. You can’t tell what, though.  It’s just a niggling sense of doubt at the back of your mind, something you push can easily push back the same way you have every day of your life for the last three years.

 **“** Hey,” you say, concern etched into your voice.  You squat down to his level. “You okay?”

You’re not prepared for the short burst of anger that follows.  Even with his breath coming in bursts and starts, his voice is fierce.  “Do I fucking look okay to you?  Fuck off.”

Well, okay.  Rude, but whatever, you wouldn’t be in the happiest mood if you’d been beat up like that either.  You still want to make sure he’s not going to fall flat on his face anytime soon, though. You don’t really want that on your conscience. 

So you wait around.

He starts to groan again, and it’s such a hopeless sound.  “Dear Gog, no, it’s not enough that I have to suffer two jackasses with the brain power of a mosquito bite deciding it’d be fun to beat me up, but now I’ve got to deal with Queen Caring cooing over me like I’m some sick puppy that’s managed to bite its own tail in some desperate fit of abhorrent stupidity.  Please, if you’re up there, strike me down kill myself or everyone around me, I’m begging you.”

You suppose the last part was supposed to make you back off, but in truth, his rant makes you want to laugh. You know you shouldn’t, so you keep it bottled up before you can offend him anymore than you have with your sheer presence.  Now that you think about it, puppy is a pretty fitting description for him.  Sharp teeth and a small stocky frame, really big, yellow eyes with just a hint of his blood colour bleeding into the irises.  Or iris, at least, his left eye is too swollen to really make out what colour it is.  It’s really alarming, actually.  Maybe you should take him to the doctor.  But no, you suppose inviting him into your car is going a step too far.

 “I’m just trying to figure out if you need help or anything,” you say.  You laugh nervously and gingerly go to pap his shoulder.  He flinches back.  His expression goes through a tumult of emotions in about a second.  First fear, then loathing, then really deep loathing, then a flicker of exasperated contentment.  But before you can really take stock of it all, his face is set back into that scowl of hate.

“Don’t touch me,” he hisses at you.  There’s a pause while he winces and takes in shallow breaths to collect himself.  “Listen,” he says, words seething in sarcasm but calmer.  “I’m touched by your pity, truly, every inch of me is basking in it right now like the sun is shining from your ass and I’m the pathetic slump of meat caught in its heavenly rays.  But I don’t need it.  I don’t need you.  I’m fine.”

His words catch on the last two words.  He begins to splutter, cough, then groan and wrap his arms around his waist.  You watch helplessly until the groaning subsides and he’s too tired to look at you with all the hate he had managed to muster before.

 “You don’t look okay to me, dude,” you chime, offering him a hand to help him up.  For a second he looks like he wants to bite you, but then the moment passes and the mask cracks and all you see is a boy with tired eyes and a bleeding face.

 “All I wanna do is help.  Look, sorry if I offended you or something, but you’re hurt and it’s not like I can just pretend you’re not here, even if you’re sort of an asshole.  So come on.”  You wave your hand in front of him a little.  There’s a second of hesitation and an agonising little whimper that escapes his lips before he takes it.  Carefully you haul him up, taking care to avoid the bruises that probably cover his chest.  When you let go, he stumbles a moment before catching himself on the wall behind him.  He breathes heavily; you watch him concerned.

 “Thanks,” he says sheepishly, and you feel the tension between you begin to crack.  You laugh, you’re not sure why, probably due to some relief that he’s thanking you and not ripping your heart out or scowling your soul from your body. 

 “That’s no problem!  I’d have done it for anybody.  I’m John.”  You offer a hand again, this time to shake, and a beaming smile.  Whatever they say about trolls, they still have thoughts and feelings, even if it’s mostly just ‘angry, angry, angry’ all the time.

He takes your hand tentatively and quickly drops it as if it might be poisonous.  “Karkat.”  He looks behind him then at the ancient, cracked watch on his wrist.  Some unrecognisable expression flits across his face.  “I have to go.  Friends’ll worry.  Thanks… Again… Sorry for shouting.”

This gets a giggle from you as well.  “That’s alright, I’d be angry too if a couple of butts started whaling on me.  What did you even do?”

Karkat looks annoyed again, all traces of past sheepishness taken by the breeze and blown as far away as possible.  “Nothing, I just told them they were asses for spitting at me.  _Apparently_ when some moron human smiles at me like a predator and I get gobbed on in the fucking face, _I’m_ the one at fault. _Apparently_ they’re not too fond of trolls being less than passive prey to just pick up and choke down their fat little throats. _Apparently_ there’s no need to treat us like we’re people, because _obviously_ we’re not.” He’s breathing hard for a while.  “No offense.”

The bitterness in his voice stings and you just stand there awkwardly while Karkat gets over his rant.  But then you see his face, see the way his eyebrows are knotted in the middle and his teeth are all bared and it looks so weird on a guy that short that you can’t help but giggle again. Something about him makes you do that.

He looks at you like he’s offended.  Oh, it probably looks like you’re laughing at what he just said, doesn’t it? 

 “No!” You squeak, before he can bristle and tear into you with another rant.  “I wasn’t laughing at you!  I mean, I was, but not in that way! Like, not at what you said.  You just looked funny, your face was all like –“ you do a poor imitation of a scowl and giggle hesitantly again.  “I’m sorry!  It just made me laugh.”

Smooth.

You suspect it wasn’t just him telling them they were asses, either. You’ve known him for 10 minutes tops and in that time he’s released three angry tirades in your direction. You suspect it was something more akin to a spoken dissertation on their assedness, the reasons exactly why they were asses and their almost impressive commitment to assedry, but you let that thought slide without laughing, just in case.

Meanwhile Karkat’s looking like you might just be the biggest idiot he’s ever set eyes on.

 “Listen,” he says, bringing you back to the real world.  “I have to go.  See you, John.”

You nod.  “Later, Karkat.”  You feel a little put out.

He walks into the alleyway and you watch his back recede into the shadows.  You turn and see your dad, gripping the steering wheel in worry.  He probably never took his eyes off of you.  It’s nice, you guess, having a dad that loves you that much, but it can get a bit annoying sometimes.

It’s only as you smile at him and make your way back to the car it hits you, the reason why his eye and blood looked so odd.  You stop quite suddenly, eyebrows shooting up in sudden epiphany.  You’ve never seen a troll with bright red blood before. 

Karkat is a mutant.

For some reason the thought doesn’t worry you, doesn’t make you shiver, doesn’t make you jump into the car and urge your dad to find the nearest shower to scrub all the filth off.  It’s not like he was the first mutant you’d met, after all.  First troll mutant, sure, but then trolls weren’t so different from people, if Karkat was anything to go by, were they?

Blah!  You don’t like thinking about it.  You hop into the car, beam at your dad and ask him to drive on.

* * *

 

The houses are the same as they were when you left them, neat and stagnant and perfectly arranged.  As soon as you’re inside, Dad gives you a lecture on talking to strangers, but ends it by saying he’s proud of you for helping something in need.  You guess that means you’re off the hook, so you mutter a quick apology, a quick “thanks, Dad” and then abscond as fast as you can to your room.

You puzzle over the day, thoughts about the troll you took care of filling your head and making it hard to take notice of anything else.  Too much thinking!  Too many thoughts.  Things are fine.  You helped someone. 

A little voice at the back of your mind hopes you get to see him again someday.

You remember the shades, glad to have something to redirect your thoughts, and overlook them in the light of your room.  The sun casts shadows against the wall, your glasses on the windowsill refract light into a myriad rainbow that filters into your room, onto your face, painting you the colours of the spectrum.  You try on the shades and look in your mirror, the light highlights the angles of your face, covering one half in oily shadow. 

They’re tacky, cheap and plastic.  They look like you bought them where you bought them, a disorganised marketplace in the middle of a tired city.  The only redeeming quality is the lenses, their mirroring allowing you to look out into the world with no one able to look in.

Dave is gonna love them.


	2. A Place in the City

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meet the family

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Better safe than sorry, so trigger warning for implied past rape.

Your name is Karkat Vantas, and fuck are you hurting.

If they hadn’t have beaten you up so close to home you don’t know if you would have made it.  It’s not like you’re not used to pain, life in its perpetual fuckery has thrown pain at you like it’s candy and you’re the slavering child it so desperately wants to please.  It’s just that you’re pretty sure you hit your head, because right now the world isn’t staying still and your legs won’t be talked into walking in a straight line.  Everything about your body feels wrong.

Sometimes you wonder if the universe is laughing at you.

The journey home is short and mostly uneventful.  There’s the occasional human stumbling drunk in the early afternoon, the more than occasional troll sitting morosely against a wall or on damp cardboard.  One is asleep or dead.  You wonder if any of the sleeping trolls here dream.  You doubt it.  The streets near to what could feasibly pass off as your crapshack are emptier than usual. 

The closer you get to your decrepit hovel the more the cracks in the pavement show, the more your neighbourhood turns into a horror. It makes you laugh sometimes imagining what humans would think if they saw this place.  It’s a middle class nightmare, the architectural equivalent of a gang of teens in hoodies, playing with knives and sporting tattoos that say “FUCK U” in big, obnoxious letters on their foreheads.

You pause to rest a moment, breathing heavily as you jut your hand out to support your weight against the side of someone’s house.  You’re such a fucking idiot, why don’t you just lie low like a sane troll would?  But the marketplace attracts you.  It’s not like this dead place, it’s one of the only sites in the city where trolls and humans can intermingle properly, even if it is only a little bit.

You like to see the way that those people live, the humans.  The way they can gossip and laugh without having to think about food or money or the possibility that some piece of shit will beat them up just for existing.  It makes you feel, in a small way, free.  And sure, there’s the prodigious stench of something close to voyeurism about it.  But no one can deny you the need to escape sometimes, not like they deny you everything else.

Escape comes to you every Wednesday like clockwork through the marketplace, where you can pretend that everything is right.

But it’s still no excuse for being a moron.  Why, why did you ever open your stupid trap when those douches spat at you?  What did you possibly think would happen?  They’d apologise profusely?  Give you a little kiss on the hand, a friendly pat on the ass and a chummy wink in your direction?  Of course they’d beat the crap out of you.  That’s what humans did.  They stopped to play with their toys and then they left when they got bored.

To be honest, that’s what you were expecting when they boy started towards you, the one with eyes like noonday sky.

But then he talked to you.  He opened his buck-toothed idiot mouth and he talked to you like you were someone with a brain and a face and you were someone real, not just an entity to be strenuously ignored or disapproved of.  You were someone in his eyes.  For the first time in your life, you were actually treated with something close to respect.

Thinking about the whole scenario makes your head hurt.  You get walked all over, crushed to dust every day of your life with no end in sight and then suddenly this guy thinks you’re worth talking to?  Thinks he can saunter up to you like it’s the most normal thing in the world?  It has to be some sort of joke.  Some sort of malicious, idiotic prank.  Why would anyone mess with your head like that?  It’s the most cunning way to fuck with you.

The images won’t leave your head.  The worry in his eyes looked genuine.  You don’t like thinking about it.

But you do anyway.

* * *

 

It’s dilapidated and disgusting and holding itself together with a force close to magic, but it’s home and your feeling of relief is undeniable.  A tiny place with one floor and three rooms, made of aged brick covered in cracked and stained plaster.  Tall apartment buildings rise like mute giants on either side of you, blocking all sunlight that isn’t filtered through the soot and grime of the city.  But then, you think, darkness becomes your kind.

Troll children are playing where the street ends, right outside the battered door to your home.  One has huge horns.  They twist and curl around her head and over her ears, framing her face in yellow, red, orange.  It’s beautiful.  She’ll be dead for it.  They’ll shoot her down, take the horns, use them as an aphrodisiac for some rich, fat human, bloated with money and their own sense of unjust self-worth so pungent and overwhelming they’d probably fuck themselves if they could.  And in the end, it’ll just be one less voice in a city full of screaming.

You nervously pat your own head.  Safe.  Maybe you should tell those kids to get out of the street before they hurt themselves.

“You!  Fuck off!”

They look up and scamper away.  Nothing more terrifying than an angry mutant troll covered in blood.  Even here, you’re sort of a pariah.

You move towards your house and kick the door open.  It’s never locked, there’s nothing worth stealing.  You doubt it would even lock properly.  You’ve known the trolls around here for ages anyway, they’re all pretty not-dickish.  The sort of guys who stick together.

The scraping of the wooden door against dirt ground makes your ears ache, same as it does every time you come home.  The walls inside are just as grey and broken as out, only here’s there’s less light.  If you were human, there’d barely be enough to see the only piece of furniture in the room, a mattress looking like it’s been dropped by some giant hand and left to rot.  But you have sensitive eyes, you see through the darkness perfectly.  You see the sofa, the dining room table, the spare bed if Vriska ever stays over (although none of you are ever truly comfortable when she’s here) in the form of a mattress you found abandoned on the side of the road.  It’s the centrepiece that the most fucked up family in the world gathers around.

“Kar?  That you, brother?”  A slurred voice from one of the rooms to your left.  The sound of lazy shuffling.  A walk that sighs and smiles at the same time.  A member of that family is calling your name and it irritates you, irks you and comforts you simultaneously.  Gamzee’s voice is like windchimes.  His words are like sandpaper.

For a second you find yourself lost in the disparate strands of your memory.  Rain, coughing, crying.  An extended hand, a friendly chuckle, a safe place.  Gamzee found you.  He found everyone.  You remember to reply.

“No, of course it’s not.  It’s someone else who wanted to enjoy the reek of month old bedding and the alluring aromas of your rank fucking facepaint.”

“Hey Karbro, nice to see ya.”  He’s shuffled in and is moving in for a hug.  He really is wearing facepaint today, so he can’t have gone to work.  Even Gamzee’s not stupid enough to go out like that in public. 

Tavros trails in behind him and instinctively moves towards the shadows, so that half of him is bathed in black while the light picks out the features on the other side of his face; the high cheekbones, the strong jaw, the hollows of his eyes.  He watches Gamzee as you shake your head, cringing back as his huge, lanky frame draws you in and swallows you up.  This juggalo is all angles.  You could cut yourself on his chin if you’re not careful.

When he lets go of you he smiles down with bloodshot eyes.  The smell of spoor is thick and cloying through your hovel.  He’s high as a bird with suicide wish, dreaming awake on his feet.  But then you hear a low stutter of “oh, shit” from Tavros and Gamzee’s face begins to fall in on itself; landslide features that melt into a frown.

“What happened, motherfucker?  You look like you all up and fell in a cat’s nest.”

“Cat’s don’t have nests you sack of shit.”  You wince as your lip breaks in two again and blood starts trailing down your chin.  “It’s nothing,” you say quieter.  “Humans.”

Gamzee makes a strangled little noise at the back of his throat and moves in for another hug before you push him back.  Tavros just looks worried, but then he always looks worried.  Maybe he looks more worried than usual as he leaves to get a wet tissue and comes back to dab it gingerly at your face.

Usually you’d shake him off, berate them both for being so fucking patronising, but you’re so tired right now.  And this is your family.  This is all they can do.  They can hug you close and tell you it’s okay when it’s not.  But everyone here will believe the words, because what else is there to do?

Gamzee and Tavros are both mutants as well, except they’re the kind that can actually do stuff instead of just bleed a fucked up colour.  It’s not exactly surprising with Tavros, seeing as he’s so far down the hemospectrum he’s rubbing shoulders with Dante and having drinks with fucking Lucifer, but Gamzee’s a highblood.  Usually you’d be wary of snapping at an indigo like him (even if you’d eventually just ignore yourself and release a tirade that would probably get you killed) but the sopor and Tavros keep him as stable as they get.  It sort of muffles the weird chucklevoodoos he can use when he flies ceremoniously off the handle, though.

In fact, he could probably have kept his mutation hidden, unlike you.  They both could.  They might have been able to nab themselves one of the slightly more comfortable apartments, with proper beds and tables and chairs, it's not like no one else did it.  But no, Gamzee didn’t care what anyone knew about him and he wouldn’t leave your side, even if that meant the he could never legally have a half-decent place to live.  It didn’t matter, though.  He found this place and kept you safe.  It’s home.   And when Tavros joined the picture two years later he never questioned it, he was and is too devoted to Gamzee to move an inch away from him.

You have them to thank for everything.

But Jegus fucking Christ almighty they can be annoying as hell.

All of you mull around awkwardly as you go to check your watch, trying to look past Tavros’ hands at your face.  Broken.  Of course it is.  Stuck on the same time for fuck knows how long, a crack bisecting it perfectly, running straight through the six and the twelve.  If it’s possible to sigh furiously, that’s what you’re doing right now.

It’s Tavros who breaks the silence; he finishes cleaning you up, stutters out an offer of tea and you nod.  You think of giving him a smile, just to make sure he knows you’re grateful, but the pain in your body is starting to make itself more known now, moving like starlings from one limb to another, so all that comes out is a sort of grimace mixed with a curse.

He bustles off back into the room he just left, the kitchen/Gamzee and Tavros’ room.  (You remember how Gamzee insisted the kitchen be near him so he could have easy access to all his pie making materials). He seems slightly annoyed at your outburst but it wasn’t your damn fault, was it?  Gamzee is unperturbed.  He even gives a light chuckle when you look at him, pointing to the puffed up eye hidden behind your scowl.  “Looks like it wants a motherfuckin’ kiss, brother.  Might have to take it up on that offer.”

You don’t even have the chance to mutter a fuck off before he’s making his way to Tavros.  You sit on the mattress and watch Gamzee wrap his arms around the broad troll through the open door as he fills the kettle. See Tavros smile slightly.  They’re inseparable, those two, have been ever since Gamzee found him on the street a year ago, doing things for perverse, stuck up humans that no one should ever feel they have to do.  Tavros is short, almost as short as you, but broad shouldered and strong.  The one’s like him, the ones with looks, they get whistled at or slapped on the ass or taken into an alleyway for – fuck.  This shit makes you angry.  It makes you angry that someone you know ever had to go through it all.  It makes you angry that anyone anywhere would feel they have to spend their days with tired old men in reeking cars selling sex for a way to live.  Maybe he thought it would be better if he decided he was choosing that lifestyle, easier to cope with.  Maybe he just needed to survive.  Neither of you like to talk about it much. 

The idea makes you shiver, it makes you sad, and you wonder if that’s part of the reason he stutters so much and his self-esteem is the size of a blastocyst.  But then you guess you’re not exactly the kind of guy that makes anyone feel at ease around you, except for Gamzee, and he’s off his face on sopor most of the time.  God you’re pathetic.  You’re all pathetic.

You try and redirect your thoughts, cheer your miserable self up and distract yourself from all the nightmares there are in the world.  It’s sort of weird how Gamzee managed to get him, you think.  Like, the guy is way out of Gamzee’s league (which is something you like to remind him of every so often, but you only ever get an “I know man, it’s a motherfuckin’ miracle” and a drug-addled chuckle in response).  But there’s something in Tavros that cleans the wound, and something in Gamzee that soothes the scars.  They’re perfect for each other, really.  Two dreamers, two people wrapped up and escaping into each other.

You, on the other hand… you don’t have the blessing of dreams inherent in your personality.

You only realise the water has finished boiling when Tavros trips and almost spills tea all over you.  He bites his lip and gives you an apologetic glance, takes more careful steps, sets the mug down lightly on the floor next to you.  You thank him gruffly, but you can’t pay attention for very long.  You’re thinking.  Thinking, always thinking, your head is alive with the memories of the day and you want nothing more than to forget, try to dream forever and rip the memory of worried blue eyes from your mind.  You don’t want to think, but you do anyway.

Thoughts, memories, the people around you; they’re all you have to cling to.

You don’t have dreams anyway.

Gamzee collapses next to you on the mattress, pulling Tavros down next to him so he can rest his angular head on Tavros’ shoulder.  God, they’re sickening.  Like two baby birds or a big basket full of puppies.  You want to get annoyed at them, be pedantic and petulant to fill out the tedium with something close to fun, but you’re tired and your brain keeps wandering back to that street, that hair as black as yours, that wide smile, the idiot laugh, the boy who treated you as someone rather than something.  But fuck, you’re so tired and you really don’t want to think right now, not with this headache.

“I’m going to sleep.”

Tavros looks up at you.  “Oh.  You haven’t touched your tea.”

“Yeah, sorry.  I just need to sleep.  Thanks for it anyway, though.”

His eyebrows shoot up.  How surprisingly cordial you’re being today.  Not even one death threat since you came through the door, that’s got to be something to celebrate.  You guess it’s because you’re tired, because you have thoughts playing like children on your mind.

“Put those down.” You say, gesturing to Tavros’ forehead and the eyebrows so high they move past his Mohawk, through the roof and into the lower regions of the atmosphere.  “I’m tired as all hell so I need to sleep.  Don’t have sex, please, these walls are paper thin and as much as I love hearing the tales of Doctor Love and Nurse Pleasure, they’re not spectacular resting material”.

The bright brown of Tavros’ blush as he buries his face in his hands forces a bark of laughter out of you, and a low, languid chuckle from Gamzee.

You get up and walk the four steps it takes to get to your room, right next to Gamzee and Tavros’.  There’s no door, only a curtain which you pull back to reveal another mattress, three ransacked books on a derelict one-legged table and an ancient radio tuned to static.

You get into bed.  You won’t dream.

Restless, fidgeting, aching, sleep comes to you in a second.

* * *

 

When you wake up, it’s dawn.  You can see the first nervous steps of sunlight enter your room from the window behind your bed.

Your bruises have healed some, fading from that angry red that contrasted so loathsomely with your grey skin to a heavy, mottled blue.  Trolls heal faster than humans, or at least most do.  Burgundy bloods are stupidly fragile and browns like Tavros only heal at about the same rate.  You’re not sure what you are, but at least you’re not dying from a papercut.

You feel like you’ve been slapped around by the hand of God himself.  Probably shouldn’t have slept this long.  Everything about you feels weird, tired and groggy and wrong.  You turn to lie on your belly, look out to the rising sun. 

Your hand falls on the tuning knob of the radio and you change it to the news station.  The anchor says something about crimes only a troll would commit.

No. 

It’s not just the sleep.  It’s everything.  It’s every cut and scratch and broken bone, every whispered or shouted tormented word, every slur, every stare.  It’s life, the desperate, toxic, ridiculous struggle for survival that every troll on this pathetic slab of a planet has to stumble their way through.

Today will be the same.  The sun rises and promises change but it’s lying, because for the fucktonne of trolls who don’t even get to choose the colour of their underwear it’ll just be the same as yesterday, the same as tomorrow.  There’ll be killings and beatings and forced slavery and not one person on this damn planet will bat an eyelid and Jegus Christ you’re getting angry.  Desperately, horribly angry.  So you punch your pillow, headbutt the mattress, tear at the bedsheets with your claws but it’s not doing anything because it’s down to your bones, white hot anger that burns your skeleton and immolates you from the inside out while you start to shout and cry and curse every stupid fucking thing that the world has ever thrown at you.

And you don’t want this to carry on.  And you can only think of one thing.

Things need to change.

Things need to stop being so shitty for everyone.

There’s only so long you can keep yourself in this three roomed shack having to listen to your best friend and his boyfriend moaning through paper thin walls.

There’s only so long you can deal with seeing them hurt.

Time’s up.

You move to the polished piece of found metal that serves as your mirror and stare at yourself.  You hate that reflection.  Your grey skin, your jet hair, the blood that oozes from a bisected lip.  You hate every inch of you that reminds you of where you stand and what you are. 

You hate every human who thinks they’re better than what’s in the mirror.

No… not all of them.  The boy from yesterday; some of them must be on your side, even if they are giant fucking tools with buckteeth the size of a school.

Calm down.  You have to think rationally.  You need to start making a stand.

A new day.

Things need to change.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I stayed up all night doing this because I started writing the redraft and I didn't stop. Tavros is able bodied here, but that will change (much) later. I think updates are going to be a bit slower from now on, I only have the sparest notes for the next two chapters.
> 
> ALSO if anyone knows how to get some pesterchum action in on this for the next chapter any help would be gratefully and tearfully accepted.


	3. Something Big

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dave and Jade

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry this took so long to upload (and that I accidentally uploaded it half done because I'm an idiot) but there have been some family problems that may delay further chapters as well.
> 
> HUGE THANK YOU TO POEAMI FOR HELPING WITH THE CODING

Your name is John Egbert, and you are bored as hell.

The past few days have been endlessly monochrome, passing by so seamlessly you were hardly able to tell the difference between night and day.  At points you even took to watching the neighbours as they executed their daily schedules, unsuccessfully trying to name the little old woman next door watering her plants.

You are stuck in a rut, you know it, you can feel its sticky hands clambering all over you and inspiring an awful sense of lethargy.  Everything feels like that to you right now, lethargic.  Even the sun seems stapled to the sky, like it wants to move but it’s too tired to break free.  Not that you’ve looked out the window in a while now.  Nope, you’re just staring at the ceiling, mindlessly trying to find patterns in the dimpled whitewash.

You need something.  Something to do.  You let a long sigh escape you as you roll onto your belly and look around the room for an activity, a book, anything to sedate your mind.  Your computer sleeps soundly at the far end, Dave’s aviators packed in a neat red box on the desk next to it.  You’ll send them to his city’s Post Mistress tomorrow, Dave can probably pick them up safely from there.  From downstairs you can hear the sound of cake tins clattering and the Condesce’s address from the kitchen TV, a weekly reminder of how nice things are and how everything is right.  Then the jingling theme to ‘World’s Ugliest Cats’.

Boring!  Everything is so boring!  Your dad will try to boringly force cake on you the same boring way he does every single boring week.  He’ll call you with his boring voice to eat boring sweets and watch boring TV in your boring house in your boring neighbourhood.  It’s all so stagnant.  You’re trapped in the unmoving waters of this city swamp.

It’s been days and days since anything even remotely exciting happened to you.  The summer has been getting hotter and hotter, instilling you with its heat triggered apathy, and you’ve spent those days doing the same things for each and every waking hour, like a child stuck in an empty playpen, scheduling the moments to give some semblance of reality.

You just want something new to happen for a change.  And if you weren’t feeling so lacklustre, that would scare you a little.

You might have thought it was something to do with the troll boy from a few days ago, but you’ve pretty much forgotten about him.  No thought wasted on Karkat with the candy red blood and gruff voice and messy hair and funny scowl, or the way his eyes darted and how he looked a little scared before looking not a little pissed off.   How he might be after those wounds.  Who those ‘friends’ of his were that he was returning to.  The dicks who beat him up.  Not a thought.  Yep.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if you could see him again, just to make sure he was okay.

You shake your head.  He’s fine, everything is fine, you’re in your room staring at your ceiling and not thinking about Karkat or the day you went to the marketplace or anything like that. 

Long periods of boredom are usually interspersed with utterly pointless bursts of action, so when you move to your computer you don’t walk, you jump out of bed and launch yourself at the desk, slapping the on button of your desktop with severely misplaced gusto.  It takes your mind off things that weren’t on your mind to begin with, at least.  You don’t really expect any of your friends to be online, it’s not even dusk yet, but there’s only so long you can entertain yourself by doing nothing.

As you rouse your computer from its sleep a slick animation proudly shows off the State motto.  “Community, Identity, Stability”.  It’s the same motto plastered onto the gates of every school and engraved above the door of every government building.  The same motto said every week in the husky, low tones of the Condesce at the end of her address, a motto that is supposed to be everything you love about the place you live.

And yet… And yet…

When you sign into pesterchum you’re a little surprised to see that of only two handles you have, one has a glowing green dot next to it.  You’re slightly less surprised when, almost instantly, a wall of lime text cheerfully assaults you.

\-- gardenGnostic [GG] began pestering ghostlyTrickster [GT] \--

GG: oh god john youre finally on!  daves been keeping me up with his beatboxing for the past hour and a half and im sure hes just doing it to annoy me >:[   
GT: hi jade!   
GT: aren’t you two supposed to be sleeping?  or am i interrupting a passionate moment? hehehe   
GG: ewww!!! no john >:P daves like a brother!!! that’s really horrible :(   
GT: hehe, you know i was joking jade, don’t worry!   
GT: two years together on your own, though? seems pretty suspicious if you ask me.   
GG: john!!!! its not like im here by choice >:O   
GG: honestly you sound more like him every day! i should have seen this coming when i introduced you two :(  i had enough trouble and pointless innuendos from just one dave   
GT: hey! i am not anything like dave.   
GG: :P   
GT: jade :(   
GG: O_O   
GT: jaaaaaaaade :(   
GG: hehe okay fine! youre right youre not anything like dave. youre like no one else i know :)

You breathe out another sigh, more melancholy this time, and lean back into your chair.  For four years you’ve been talking to Jade.  She’s the one who introduced you to Dave, who you go to for help with problems in life and issues with homework.  One of your best friends in the world who you know through one grainy picture and thousands upon thousands of neon green words.  She lives just one city away with Dave, but it’s too dangerous for her to make the half-day trip though the farming fields to your city and you’re too trapped in suburbia to make your way to hers.

It’s a shame, an ache in your chest, because in a way you owe her and Dave everything.  They were the first people who gave your life substance, got you to stop living each day because that’s the thing to do and got you to live each day because there was always something to look forward to.    But this isn’t a conversation you should be having.  None of the words you’ve spoken can ever be found out.  It’s not the law or anything, you doubt anything in the law even acknowledges her existence, but… you’re pretty sure bad things would happen if you were ever caught.

Jade is a mutant.  A human mutant.  You hadn’t believed her when she told you at first, it wasn’t something normal.  It wasn’t something you’d even heard of.  You were angry and scared and she gave you excuses about how it’s all hushed up by the government, how she has to hide out at Dave’s in a dirty, ignored part of her city because he’s less conspicuous, a less mutant looking mutant.  And you’d sort of stopped talking to her for a while after that.

You’re not very proud of how you blanked her for the next few weeks; you even stopped talking to Dave for a while.  But you began to miss the way they’d interact with you, so much less formal and stagnant than the people you’re surrounded with every day.  And then you began to wonder why you were even ignoring her anyway, with no reason making itself know to you other than the lingering terror in your gut even though you knew that they’d never do anything to hurt you.  You were never a coward.  So you committed the first act of rebellion you’ve ever done; you swallowed your pride and you apologised.

And of course she was angry, angrier than you’ve ever heard her, but she forgave you in the end.  She wanted to prove it to you, send you a picture of her and Dave even though you said over and over that you believed her now.  After all, Jade wouldn’t lie; who would lie about a thing like that?  But she sent it to you anyway, an ironic mirror selfie of her and Dave in their tiny bathroom and, well, she was definitely a mutant.  She had dog ears on top of her head for a start.

You had to delete the picture as soon as you saw it.

GT: thanks, jade!   
GT: why are you up so early anyway?  or is this late for you?   
GG: dave had a bad dream :P

There’s a tiny pause before Jade starts typing again.

GG: dave told me to tell you that he didn’t have a bad dream but he totally did   
GG: ugh!!! hang on he wants to talk to you   
GT: about the dream?   
GG: i dunno! bye John!! :)   
GT: bye

\-- gardenGnostic [GG] ceased pestering ghostlyTrickster [GT] \--

Jade’s dot goes from green to grey.  Dave’s does the opposite.

He’s never needed to talk to you about one of his dreams before.

You don’t like it.

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] started pestering ghostlyTrickster [TG] \--

TG: sup   
GT: hey, dave!   
TG: hows life going on perfection boulevard egbert?   
GT: perfection boulevard?   
GT: weak   
TG: thats okay i guess its still too early for you to understand the ironic subtleties of my word gold   
GT: i am beginning to think that you use irony as an excuse when you make a weak joke   
GT: like just now?   
GT: way weak, dude   
TG: please youre just lucky im not using my a grade stuff because im tired   
TG: not that striders ever get tired   
TG: the world around us gets too awake   
TG: hey whats that?  i think its the world getting up for the morning   
TG: time to rest my weary head and escape to the land of sleep   
TG: maybe i can find the egbert of my dreams in the hollow of some tired old tree and spend the rest of my days cooking us dinner and making flower crowns   
GT: dave.  no.   
TG: dont pretend you dont love it   
TG: its difficult not to fall ass backwards into a fit of masturbatory reverence when faced with the strider charm   
TG: youre typing with your left hand now arent you?   
GT: oh my god, dave, can we please just get to why you are pestering me?   
TG: fine if you insist   
TG: but only for my sweet maiden.   
GT: yeah right, i’m your knight in shining armour and you know it   
TG: egbert please im as knightly and brave as they come   
TG: youre my noble steed   
TG: a damsel in distress at best   
TG: come midnight we must ride at once to save princess egbert   
GT: you’re such a dork   
TG: you shouldnt talk to a knight like that. penance will have to be paid   
TG: i demand the damsels chastity   
GT: you’re so weird!

You haven’t even been talking five minutes before Karkat worms his way into your mind again, a memory of blood and sad eyes and sad anger.  Your fingers hover over the keys.  You don’t like thinking, but you can’t seem to stop recently.  There are things at the back of your mind that won’t stay there.

Silently you curse yourself for ever getting involved.

GT: hey before we get to whatever you want to say, can i ask you something?   
TG: sure egbert go ahead but if its about you and me the answers gotta be no   
TG: not that i havent thought about it youre just not my type   
GT: shut up dave everyone knows you wouldn’t be able to keep  your hands off of me   
GT: it’s about trolls. what’s your opinion on them?   
TG: cant say i can exactly have an opinion on a whole group of people.  harley has a troll buddy she roleplays with from time to time and she seems pretty neat though. why? did one of the big bad trolls look at you or something?   
GT: no, nothing like that.  it’s just i sort of talked to this troll the other day and he didn’t seem so bad, like not as bad as the news makes them out to be   
GT: he was a mutant, like you   
TG: well congrats egbert you accomplished the feat of treating another person with respect even while youre being brainwashed by your whole hearted family media.   
TG: im glad we had this chat   
GT: ugh whatever, all i wanted was an opinion   
TG: and you got a healthy dash of charm to go along with it   
TG: are you melting in a sensual puddle on the floor?   
TG: hell even im dripping a little and im basically cocooned in this shit all day   
GT: wow. can we stop now?   
TG: okay   
GT: really? just like that?   
TG: i need to talk to you john   
GT: is this about your dream?  was it one of those dreams?   
TG: maybe. i dont know.  there was lots of screaming and dust and stuff.  it was like a movie theatre after being subjected to one of your shitty films.   
GT: my films are masterpieces.   
TG: you were there.   
GT: what?  how do you know it was me?   
TG: egbert if youre anywhere near as dorky looking as you sound it was definitely you   
TG: plus you sent us a picture once remember?  when you were still beating yourself up over the harley thing   
TG: we have it framed.  harley gives it a kiss every night   
GT: nope, i am not taking the bait.   
GT: here is the bait and here i am totally not taking it   
GT: how do you like that mr. charming?   
TG: im like a proud mother hen teaching her chick to fly   
GT: hens don’t fly   
TG: irony   
GT: sure.   
GT: why was i there?   
TG: in the dream?  i dont know. it might have just been a dream   
TG: but i dont know man  
TG: maybe my weird mutant powers are kicking in  
TG: i just feel like something is gonna happen  
GT: what something?  
TG: egbert did you not get the general gist of what ive been spilling my guts out for?  
TG: i dont know  
TG: but i think something is coming  
TG: something big

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short chapter this time, next one will be longer, I promise


	4. Friend of Ours

Your name is Karkat Vantas and go fuck yourself.

The dawn was cool, the morning is stagnant, the streets are calm and you are seething.  The sun carries on its achingly slow ascent to its peak where it’ll hang and then drop to carry on again, like the broken, scratched record of ‘fuck my life and fuck this planet’ it is.  Your feet carry you without conscious consent, guiding you through back alleys wreathed in the stench of undreamt nightmares so that you’re free to get lost in the clusterfuck of your thoughts. 

It’s like no one can see how shit swallowingly terrible everything is.  Things are not fine, they are the furthest from fine anything can be, fine is a distant speck of disgustingly oblivious dust from where you are in the hallway of life.  The radio in your room which you now have constantly tuned the news channel blurts out barefaced lies along with convenient truths, and every damn week the Condesce chokes out her message to the idiots in her revolting voice that makes you want to projectile vomit yourself into the stratosphere. 

The people are dying and no one can see.

No.  That’s not true, they can see it okay, they just don’t want to get off their stupid or drugged-up or neurotic asses and change things.

You sigh.  And it’s odd because sighing doesn’t change anything, sighing doesn’t even seem to have meaning anymore.  Life is just one long sigh to you.  But you still sigh.

That morning had seen the biggest but by no means the first argument between you, Tavros and Gamzee.  Honestly, it’s amazing they’ve managed to live this long with information leaking so heavily from their dumb brains.  All your words go in one ear and out the other, you’re the priest preaching to sceptics, and now walking the streets you’re a mendicant getting tired of his own message.

You had told them how something needed to be done, how you were so fucking exhausted from the terror that they wouldn’t make it back when they went out, or that somehow their lives would revert back to the respective hells you were all trapped in before meeting each other, weak and only just able to live through the day.  You didn’t want to be a preteen on the streets again. You didn’t want to live without them again. 

And they had stood there listening to all the things ejaculating from your idiot mouth and they had taken it all in and leaked it all out and they had crushed your vision to dust with just one word: how?  There was nothing they could do, not on their own.  They were insignificant ants in the Condesce’s garden, they were further away from change than ‘fine’ was from the three of them.  And after days of all these feelings and thoughts building up in your head and drilling headaches through your skull, you lost it.

It made you angry, it made you so, so angry for no other reason than things weren’t going your way; you shouted things you can’t quite remember, grabbed your coat and stumbled into the late morning air, bathing the streets in your childish tantrum.  You know they’re right.  There _is_ nothing you can do, not on your own.  You were just three teenage trolls barely scraping a survival, two out of a job and one working whenever he could as a grave digger.  You’re an idiot, you’re such a moron.  ‘Things need to change’, are you completely fucking retarded?

At least highbloods can get jobs easier than lowbloods, even if they are drug-addicted messes.  You wonder if that’s something to be relieved about.

No.  No it’s not.

And just like that the anger is back again. 

The same one that’s been burning like irons inside you, made of all the things that have been fighting to escape and fuck you can feel yourself getting less and less stable; you keep getting lost in possibilities, visions, dreams and losing your footing on the here and now.

But fuck stability.  This world isn’t stability.  And if it is, then stability is the last thing you need.

You’re sort of surprised the ground isn’t caving in on itself and cowering from the stomps of your feet.  It fucking should be.  You are a burning sun of unmitigated anger. The least the ground should be doing is shitting itself out of fear and shame.

You’re concentrating so hard on your feet rather than the world around you that you don’t realise how close you are to the road you were attacked on.  All that exists for you is your broken shoes and your clenching gut.  That doesn’t mean you’re not constantly on edge, though, an unavoidable consequence of the nature you have and the circumstances you’re growing in.

So passing the alley linking the back streets to the main road you fail to notice the lanky, shadowy form dislodge itself from a wall as you pass, or the sound of footsteps as it makes its way towards you.  But when you hear a sound that could well be an unpractised tongue fumbling over your name, you freeze momentarily and shift back, away from the voice and into the dark.

“Karkat!  Wait!” You turn to walk the way you came.  Running steps behind you.  “Karkat!”

You don’t stop.  Whatever vague familiarity that voice conjures in you is drowned out by your irritation and worry.  There are so few people who know your name, and none of them you want to talk to right now.  You tried, you failed.

“Karkat!”

Fuck it.

You stop and turn to look straight into your pursuer’s eyes.  Noonday sky.  “What?”

He stops and looks down at you; chuckles; moves to push his glasses back up his nose.  “Haha, woah.  Um, hi there I guess?”  You feel a momentary twinge of surprise when you see him before all those irked feelings come back.  You don’t have time for this.  Well, yes you do, you could literally spend all day talking to this blue-eyed imbecile thanks to your brilliant lack of employment and the aimlessness that’s come to characterise your life.  You just really don’t want to.

“What do you want?”

“Woah, okay. It’s me, John.  John Egbert?  The guy who helped you out the other day and stuff?”

“I know who you are, you ignorant twatwank, I asked what you wanted.”

For a second he looks genuinely puzzled and a little hurt.  You feel your insides squirm a little in guilt before you push that thought away into the deep recesses of your mind, where it’ll inevitably resurface as some form or other of self-loathing.  He takes a second to answer, as if processing the information and working out a way to respond.

“Well… I just, you know… I was walking by and saw you and I wanted to check if you were okay.”  He gives a nervous laugh and shrugs.

And now it’s your turn to lapse into silence.  There are not many things that can make you speechless, and apparently the drivelling sack of drowning baby puppies that is John Egbert is one of them.  Not for long, though.

“Is this a joke?” you whisper, that seething fury barely contained managing to boil to the surface again.  “Is this some sort of stupid human prank?  Are your sniggering friends waiting in that alley while you pretend to have some interest in the 7 car fucking pile-up that is my life?  Let me guess, I’m going to hear them shit themselves in delight when you inevitably slap me in the face or kick me in the head with your freakishly long legs or whatever you’re going to do and then you’ll return to go walk around the streets like really fucking big men.  I’m practically pissing into my shoes from fear right now.”

“What, no –“

“Or are you here on your own?  Which would be even fucking worse now that I think about it.  Like the rest of your dumb race you can’t even spend a day without having to vindicate you’re intrinsic worth over every other rational, thinking thing on the planet.  Go ahead, be better than me!  Go on, punch me, do whatever you want.  I fucking deserve it, don’t I.  I deserve it because I’m not you.”

“No! Dude, stop! That’s not it at all, I’d never do anything like that! Like, why would I prank you by being nice to you?  I mean, if I were going to prank you, which I totally am someday, I’d do it way less doucheily than that.  Come on, give me some credit!”

And there’s that dumb look of worry again, the exact same expression you saw almost a week ago, making your anger flare and then ebb away into the day.

He stares at you and you feel an awkward sense of not belonging anywhere.  “So… Your eye still looks a bruised, man.  You doing okay?” You look at your shoes.

“Yes.  Yeah, I’m okay.”  You sigh, everything draining from you to leave you weary and broken.  “I’m really an idiot.  Sorry for behaving like a goddamn child just then.  It’s just that humans don’t usually… No, you know what, I have no excuses.  I’m just a mountain of terrible life choices and you shouldn’t have to deal with that.”

“Oh man, don’t be like that, it’s fine, I understand.  Can I walk with you or something?”

You nod and he starts to trek back to the alley while you turn what he said over in your mind.  Two words that don’t make sense, words that you could get justifiably angry about but only serve to amplify your exhaustion, that feeling of being crushed under dreamless sleep.  That anger that fuelled your steps only a couple of minutes ago is gone, burned out and leaving your bones aching and empty and broken.

“You don’t understand.  You say you do, but you don’t.  You’re just a human, you don’t get what it’s like to be us.”  Not harsh.  Just tired.

He gives you a strange glance, one eyebrow twitched up to crease his brow in incomprehension.  “Yeah I do!  Like, I get you’re probably really tired and angry about being beat up and all, but it’s okay, just ignore those idiots.”  His smile is huge and infuriating, but you’re too drained to give a damn, so where on any other occasion you’d rise to the challenge with your extended and grotesque vocabulary, here you just shake your head and carry on walking.

“So… Um, what’s your name?  Your last name, that is?  Because I obviously already know your first name.  Wow, smooth, John.”

It’s such a strange thought that anyone would care about anything to do with you that you start searching for signs of a joke again.  But everything about John Egbert is so wide-eyed and genuine and childlike that any worry remains ungrounded and irrational.  You can practically hear the beating of the heart on his sleeve.

“Vantas.”

“Oh, okay.  That’s weird.  Probably because it’s a troll name.  I like it though, that’s a nice name.  Karkat Vantas.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m John Egbert, which you know already, I guess.  How old are you, Karkat?”

“I don’t know.”

John stops.

“What?  How can you not know how old you are?”

 “I don’t know, maybe because it’s not important?  Of all the information in the world what possible use is there for a number you can attach to the years you’ve lived?  Socks are more useful as cutlery than age is for anything remotely imperative.”

John walks again.

“Well you don’t really look any older than me, and I’m seventeen, so maybe you are too?”

You shake your head.  You can’t spend another minute with this guy.  His ignorance feels like a cancer to you.  “This has been a fucking stellar chat, John, I’ve truly learned things about my soul that I would never have unearthed by myself, but I really must be going.  Rest assured I will forever remember the day that John Egbert aged me and gave me a place in the world, I’ll carve it lovingly into my forehead so that the whole world will –“

You only realise that he’s led you onto the main roads when you see her, walking like a hurried ant towards you, head to the ground and making herself as small as possible.  People are staring, mostly at you standing with a human, but her as well; they turn away as soon as you make eye contact, pretending to ignore you.  Too many people, this street isn’t safe.

And the urge to run is almost overwhelming, it scrabbles at your insides and it’s telling you to get away somewhere safe, to make sure you don’t repeat the scene from days ago, the same scene repeated in different ways throughout your life. 

But it’s happening already.

Just not to you.

They walk with grins, juvenile sniggers.  They smack her cane away from under her, kick at the back of her legs, push at her shoulders until she falls.  Faceless laughs, pointless vindication, violent ignorance. 

No one stares anymore.

“Terezi?”  You whisper it to yourself but it’s loud enough for John to catch it. 

He hasn’t even noticed, too busy becoming part of the flow, looking into shop windows and disregarding anything further away than the length of his arms.  He looks up at you for a second, catches your line of sight and turns his head to watch.

They’re still there, still hurting her and you can’t look away and you can’t fucking help.

“Hey!  What’s going on?”  John begins to stride, closing the gap with long legs and forceful steps.  For the first time since you met him, you can feel a sense of purpose emanating from him.  “What are you doing?  What’s going on?”

You hurry to catch up while they start to stop, slowing their kicks and looking puzzled at the angry, blue-eyed boy making his way towards them. 

John, with an idiocy terrifying for someone almost legally an adult, fails to see the way they add two and two together, with their eyes flicking quickly between you, him and Terezi.  When they detach themselves from the troll on the ground you tug at his shirt, hoping that that tiny gesture will somehow get through the metre thick skull he has and penetrate his tiny brain as a plea to get away before they damage him, hurt them all more than they have.

It doesn’t.

You know they’ve lost interest in her, you know she’ll be fine, you know if you don’t run then you could possibly be joining her, beaten and broken and ignored.  You can come back for her as soon as it’s safe.  But you can’t protect her, not on your own.  All you can do is sew the lopped off limbs back on again and hope for a second that they still move.

They speak.  “What are you talking about?”

“You shouldn’t hurt it!  What has she ever done to you?”

No one does anything for a second.  And then one gives a derisive laugh.

“Sorry, trollfucker, didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.  Or your pet’s.”  The one who spoke makes a throwaway gesture in your direction.  For the smallest amount of time, you feel livid beyond comprehension, weariness forgotten, and your mouth opens of its own accord.  It’s a second that feels like a year, and your head is already lamenting how you managed to get everyone here beaten into a bloody pulp with your stupid mouth.  Before you can speak, though, John splutters.

“I’d never fuck a troll!”  That stops you.  You wince at his tone, like they’d hurled a string of incredibly offensive and imaginative swears at him.  Or, well, not quite like that since that’s basically all your relationship with him has been with him so far, but deeply offended nonetheless.  He doesn’t see.

“I just don’t like seeing them hurt, is all!  They’re like people, you know?  Real people.”

John thinks you’re a person. 

Maybe, just maybe, there’s someone on your side.

Barking giggles.  “Okay, whatever.  I’m sure you and them can have really cool conversations about politics and the weather, totally.  Right, trollfucker?  We’ve gotta go anyway. Important, non-bestial things to do.  Later, trollfucker!”

John is blushing furiously as they walk away, looking lost and ashamed.  You take very little notice of him, moving quickly to Terezi’s little form as she struggles to get up.  She bats your hands away.

After all that’s happened, of course it’s you that has to take some fucking initiative.  You reach down for Terezi’s hand, avoiding her flailing limbs as she tries to swat you away and swearing a little under your breath.  As you drag her up, you tug at John’s wrist and walk with sure steps away from the main roads, back to darkened, ignored, safe streets of home. 

And walking through the grime with your hands still linked, you begin to talk, the same talk you’ve given Gamzee and Tavros.

“This is why things need to change.  Because this shit,” you raise Terezi’s arm in the air. “is a fucking common occurrence.  I’ve been tired as fuck and angry as a barkbeast that’s been kicked in the bulge all day and this is why.”  You don’t even know who you’re talking to, John or Terezi or yourself.  It’s just the words that have been circulating in your head that haven’t found anything to latch onto yet.  “And I’m tired of being tired, so I don’t care if I have to fucking climb the tallest building in the city and deliver a heartfelt hatespeech to every dickweed that happens to walk by, I’m changing things.”

Terezi snorts.  “How Romantic.”

The look of scorn you give her would have blinded her, if she weren’t blind already.

John stops and wriggles his wrist free of your grip, forcing you to turn and look at him.

“Things don’t need to change!  They’re fine as they are.”

You just stare at him with incredulous eyes.

 “Are you truly fucking thick?  Did those assholes manage to actually punch through your dense skull and mess with your brain when I wasn’t looking?  I don’t know about you, Egbert, but I think I just saw an innocent girl get beat up and kicked around for no other reason than she was fucking there.  Did you see that?  Or were you too busy masturbating wildly to the image of the Condesce tattooed to the inside of your eyelids?”

He looks close to tears but you don’t care.  This is everything you’ve wanted to shout into a human’s face for so long you can’t remember.  You are screaming, swearing anger incarnate.

“No, but… It can’t be real… what you just said, right?  I mean, I don’t even see trolls around in the normal world usually.  You guys can’t be that hard done by if you’re never around, can you?”  He says it bluntly, but the question is so raw and he looks at you with such childlike innocence you feel the smallest stir of pity in your gut.

You push that feeling away pretty quickly.

“Why do you think we’re never seen, Egbert?”

You’ve never seen what it looks like when someone’s worldview begins to crack before, but here it is, happening right in front of you.  It’s in his eyes, the peripheral shattering of his idyll.

Good.  The jackass might as well see the truth, even if no one else wants to.

From beside you there’s a maniacal giggle.  “Is this a lover’s tiff?”

John splutters again and vehemently denies everything she says.  You just tell her to shut the fuck up.

“You shut up, Karkat.  I’m just expressing a healthy interest in your ‘friend.’”  She looks vaguely in his direction with that sickening grin of hers.  You can fucking hear the airquotes.

“Uh, sorry, who are you?  Woah, are you blind?”  The usual Egbert tact, like a mallet to the shameglobes.

Terezi doesn’t seem to mind, though.  She just covers her mouth daintily as she releases her witchlike cackle.   “why yes, I am.”  She takes the hand away and shoves it out slightly to the left of John, even though she knows exactly where he is, that fucking nose of hers.  “I’m Terezi.  Karkat and I used to date.”  You let go of her hand.

“We did not ‘used to date!’”

“Sure we did.  You even let me see your nubby little horns.  You,” she pokes her finger into John’s face.  “Come closer, I want to see you.”

As she pokes her tongue out and reaches like a grubby-fingered child for sweets towards his face, you stretch a protective arm across John’s chest.  “Terezi, shut the fuck up!”

“Is this your girlfriend?  You have _horns_?”

“Jegus Christ on a flying skateboard, she is not my girlfriend!”

“I was.”

“Terezi, if you say another word I’ll rip those stupid, pointless shades off your face and jam them so far into your visual cortex the only thing you can see, taste, smell or feel will be cheap, red plastic.”

“Well I only think John has a right to know about the competition.”

“You are not competition for John!  No one is competition for John!”

“Oh really?”

“Because he doesn’t need to compete against anyone because he’s not my fucking boyfriend, holy hell Terezi!”

“Do you seriously have _horns_?”

“Everybody please shut up before I have an aneurysm or vomit blood all over your faces, okay?”

You know she did that thing again, the thing where she makes you completely lose your cool for her own enjoyment.  Not that making you lose your cool is a real achievement, your cool is probably withered and dying from underuse over the years of your life.  It’s just that when Terezi does it you know she’s playing with you.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, it’s John who breaks the silence.  “So… you do have horns?”

“Yes, I have horns, but they’re so laughably tiny that I can grow my hair to cover them up so no one sees.  Are you happy?”

“No,” he says delicately, like crepuscular rays at dawn.

There’s a battle raging inside of him that you suddenly feel very aware of causing.  But even now, even seeing what happened, there isn’t one side that’s winning against the other.  And there he is, trapped between two ideals and you can’t help but feel sorry for him, just a little bit.  More so, though, you feel like you need him to see.

“Do you want to know how Karkat and I met?” Terezi pipes up, smiling broadly.  You start to glare at her until you see John perk up and nod, his mind pulled away from his warring morals.

“Well!  I was thirteen, I think?  And Karkat was the same age, I’m pretty sure; he was only just going through puperty.  You should have heard his voice.” She cackles again, “half the time it was like baby birds and the other half it was like running your tongue on disgruntled sandpaper, which is pretty much the stage we’re still at now.”

You bite down on your tongue to stop yourself from verbally attacking her. 

“Back then I was living in one of the apartment blocks in the east, before I moved out and started living with my friend Vriska.  And one day these two boys, one’s a little older than the other, move into this really old crapshack at the end of our street, just those two.  Usually you get four or five to a flat, but this thing was basically falling apart and no one wanted to live there.  So I thought I’d pay a visit to our new neighbours. 

“One was an asshole, one was a junkie, both were mutants, and Karkat and I have been good friends for three years now.  More than friends, at one point.”

When you realise the story is over, you stop holding yourself back.  “Yeah, back when we didn’t know any better.  I mean, first off we only ever kissed and held hands, second, my past self is an even bigger stain than I am.”

“Is that why you broke my itty bitty heart, Karkles?”

“Shut up, Terezi.  Yeah, Probably.  Sorry.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Karkat, I’m only kidding.”  She turns her face to John’s.  “What about you?”  She gives a sniff.  “Who are you, blueberry boy?”

Before John can answer, you speak up and say the words you want desperately to be true. 

“Help, I hope.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know how I feel about this chapter, but it's finally up. I sort of want to redraft it, but I feel I've left you all hanging too long already. 
> 
> I also managed to finalise my plan and everything! And because of that, even though I seriously, seriously despise ruining the story in any way, I'm going to implement a MAJOR CHARACTER DEATH and GRAPHIC DEPICTIONS OF VIOLENCE warning. I've been debating whether to add them to the tags at all, but I guess it's only proper etiquette that I do. 
> 
> Oh well, enjoy.
> 
> EDIT: I have a tumblr for this now. If you want to look at that, click on the [link.](http://tavraost.tumblr.com)


	5. Pupa Pan

Your name is John Egbert, and you are still lying in wait.

You’re not really sure what you’re doing here, what possessed you to make the twenty minute walk to the alleyway you last saw the troll boy in; you’d surprised both yourself and your dad when you said you were going out for the day.  All you really know for sure is that this is where you are now, back pressed up against the wall and a downy weight in the pit of your stomach making you feel that you don’t belong. 

You look up to the thin strip of sky you can see, sunless and cloudless with a few birds freewheeling lazily overhead.  You feel like you’re standing on the precipice between two separate worlds, with the grime of the back streets to your left cringing away from the main roads to your right. Why did you even come here?  You snort a little at yourself.  Well, to see Karkat obviously.  But why do you want to see him so much?  Why do you want to check up on an angry little troll you’ve met only once before, a mutant troll, one that might have wanted to hurt you or kill you or something?  The thing is, back then when he had the chance, he didn’t. He didn’t even raise a finger against you.  And now, maybe you’re feeling a little responsible?  Maybe it’s something else. 

Blah, you don’t like thinking about it.  You shake it from your mind, ruffle your fingers through your hair and carry on waiting.

You think maybe you should give up soon and go home, even though you know you won’t.  You’d probably stay until dusk if you had to, and then maybe a little longer as the night started bleeding into the sky.  Maybe it was a mistake, maybe Karkat won’t show up, after all there’s no guarantee he’ll ever show his face in this part of the city again, not after what happened.  You’re not really sure a sensible person would.

But your doubts don’t have too long to stew before you hear belligerent footsteps, see a small, puppy dog frame pass nearby.  And before you know what you’re doing, before you’ve even made sure it’s him, you’re calling his name, telling him to wait up.  It doesn’t click until a good while afterwards that maybe chasing Karkat through the streets near to where he was beaten half to death might not have been the most sensitive way of alerting him to your presence, but you’ve never been one to think before you act.

When he turns around abruptly you think for a second he might just launch himself at you, but no.  His shoulders are hunched slightly, one foot behind the other, keeping the option of running away as open as possible.  And when he speaks, his callousness is unexpected and a little hurtful, although really you should have expected it.  Maybe he doesn’t trust humans anymore, what with what he went through.  Maybe he’s just always on edge.  Maybe, maybe, maybe.  A siren of possibilities in your head.

But you’re a human that stuck his neck out for a troll.  He doesn’t have to be rude.  You went above and beyond what you had to do.  Shouldn’t he be thanking you?

No, you think when you see the masked anxiety behind his frown.  No, he shouldn’t.

It ambles up on you like a quiet drunk, a moment of terrifying clarity, where you see the soot stained macadam and the closed windows of grey apartment buildings.  The hidden trolls behind cheap walls and down on their luck humans etching out a place to live in this ignored part of the City.  You see, for a second, past the span of your arms.  It’s only a moment, though.  It passes.

When he asks you what you want you don’t know why you lie.  You could have told him you were waiting, that you’ve been waiting for as long as you can remember.  Instead you come up with something that doesn’t sound convincing even to you, that you were just walking around and happened to spot him.  Karkat seems to swallow it.

And once you get past the shouting and accusations he flings at you, you learn things about the troll boy which are weird as you shoot the breeze with him.  He doesn’t know his age and his name is pronounced all funny.  His whole stance is different when he’s not angry and treading heavily, more scrunched and chewed up, less severe, more damaged.  He looks, you think, a little broken. It’s probably because he was beaten so bad, but really he should just ignore it and get past it and maybe he’d be okay again.

Poor guy, no one deserves anything like that happening to them.  You know it’s rare, or at least you’re pretty sure it is, because hell, it’s rare enough seeing trolls around anyway.  But you guess it’s probably because they’re so reclusive and secretive.  They have their own part of the city with the few humans who don’t mind being there and you have yours.  Everything is fine that way.  Everything is right. 

Even when the girl is picked on, that’s what you tell yourself.

Even when Karkat drags you away and shows you things you don’t want to see, that’s what you tell yourself.

Even when the words become more and more hollow, that’s what you try to carry on telling yourself.

But it doesn’t work anymore.  The world may as well be breaking apart in front of you. 

You don’t like thinking about it, but you can’t seem to stop.

When Terezi tells you her story it distracts you, but the things you’ve always kept to the back of your mind keep resurfacing and mulling around like flies.  And you feel like somehow, even with no eyesight, she can tell.  To be honest, you’re not exactly hiding your emotions well.

“Karkat, you should invite blueberry to your place.”

“What?”  He looks over at her with an expression of annoyance and bewilderment.  She giggles.

“It’s not like he’s going to tear it down, I’m surprised Gamzee hasn’t managed to do that by tripping onto a wall already.  Just invite him round, it’ll be good for both of you.”

You don’t know how it’s possible to give a look to someone that’s both condescending and tender at the same time, but Terezi manages to do it.  And you’re not too upset about the chance to see where this mutant troll lives, even if no one had actually involved you in a conversation that is pretty much all about you.  The part of your mind with your dad’s voice tells you it’s dangerous.  The part of your mind with your dad’s voice is ignored.

Karkat shifts his weight on his feet for a while before looking up at you with wary eyes.  “Do you want to come to my house, John?”

“Uh, sure!  That is, if you don’t mind.”

Terezi gives her jack knife grin.  “Of course he doesn’t!  Now get, you two.”

“Aren’t you coming?” Karkat asks, almost desperately.

Cackle.  “Oh no, I think it would be much better if I left you two alone.”  And before either of you has the chance to say anything, she’s spinning on her heel and walking down a side street, laughing her head off.  That familiar blush is rising in your face again, and you can see the bright red of Karkat’s blood showing on his cheeks as well. 

He tuts.  “Come on then.”

 

* * *

 

The streets keep getting narrower and more cluttered as you walk, with those giant concrete mutes of living quarters rising up like oppressive fingers on either side.  It’s hard not to stare at people slumped up against walls as you go, in practically the same tortured position you found Karkat in that first time.  It’s difficult to tell whether they’re asleep or dead, but Karkat walks past and barely acknowledges that they’re there.  You wonder what made him so callous and disinterested in those around him.  But then, you realise, he’s not.  He’s not disinterested, not if that speech from earlier is anything to go by.  He’s just used to it.  You’re not sure which is worse.

God, you’d never even noticed.

Your curiosity from earlier is now fighting with apprehension and a sick feeling that won’t go away.  Karkat makes very little conversation.  He grumbles occasionally to himself but after the first couple of times you’d asked him to repeat what he said and only received a withering look in return, you learn not to push the matter.  The buildings feel like bars around you, fingers waiting to bend and grip and pin you down.  This is not where you expected Karkat would live.

What had you expected?  When you wrack your brain for an answer, you realise is that you hadn’t ever thought about it.  You hadn’t expected him to live anywhere.

Ugh, you’re such an idiot.

The sounds of little squeals and delight pull you out of your nervous reverie.  A group of kids, no more than six or seven years old, are playing in the street, wrestling and jumping over each other.  A tangled mess of children that look up to the two of you as you approach with innocent eyes.  One has the biggest horns you’ve ever seen, even if they are pretty much the only horns you’ve ever seen outside of text books.  They wrap around her head with an arietine grace.  You give a half-hearted smile and wave at them.

The horned girl lets out a tiny scream and runs away, joined by the others a few moments later.

You try not to let it show on your face, but still, you must have looked pretty put out, because after a glance towards you, Karkat speaks.

“Don’t let it get to you.  They’ve just been told by older trolls to stay away from humans.  Not your fault.”

You just nod, feeling those feelings worm their way across your skull.

You hang back as Karkat moves to the door of an entirely too small house.  One floor tall with a low ceiling and barely enough space for two rooms.  You thought the troll girl had been joking when she said that a trip could knock this place down, but seeing Karkat kick the door open her comment suddenly feels scarily pertinent. 

You hear a lilting voice drift through the walls and the open door.  “Karbro, that you?”

“Gamzee, who the fuck do you think it would be?”  He beckons you inside.  “I brought someone over.”

You walk into a dark room, dirt floor, bare walls.  No other furniture save a single stained mattress in the centre.  You feel like coughing, but that would probably be rude.

A troll with a frame tall enough to have to bend down through doorways, even with his hunched posture, enters the room.  “Ain’t like you to be all up and bringin’ company home, brother.  Who’s –“  He stops when he spots you.

“Uh, hey,” you say, with a pathetic little wave in the giant troll’s direction.  You shift uncomfortably on your feet as the troll looks at you through half-lidded eyes.  He cracks a gentle smile.

“Hey, motherfucker.  You a friend of my karbro here?” You might be imagining the subtle note of hostility there, but you’re not too sure.

“Um, yeah, you could say that.  I mean, I’d be glad if we were friends.  I’m John.”  You offer your hand for him to shake.

Either he doesn’t realise or he doesn’t care, and when you see that the troll you’re pretty sure is called Gamzee isn’t going to take your hand, you let it drop awkwardly to your side.

“Terezi asked me to invite him over, and I said yes for some unknowable reason which I am already regretting as extensively as I can manage, which is a fucking lot.”

“Kar, don’t say that about your guest, this fine motherfucker all up and went out his way to get here.  A long way out his way.”  He turns to shout into the other room.  “Tav, come meet John.”

Another troll, shorter than you by about a head, enters the room through the same battered doorway Gamzee came from.  And as he looks at you with wide eyes, you abruptly realise how surrounded you are, how you’ve never been around this many trolls in such a small space before.  You’ve never even been around this many people before, except for at school and at the marketplace.  It’s not like you feel threated, you don’t, or at least not much.  The tall one looks like he’s finding it a chore to stand while emitting a low, tuneless hum, and the one that comes in has a small frown that creases his forehead in the exact same way  your dad’s forehead creases when he’s worried about something.

And Karkat is Karkat, blustery and angry in a way that’s entirely non-threatening.

Even so, you can feel the tension rack up a notch when the broad shouldered troll takes you in.

“Oh, uhm, hey.”  He glances towards Gamzee, who nods slowly and ever so slightly. “I’m Tavros.”

“Hi, Tavros! I’m John,” you reply, sticking your hand out again.  This time it’s taken, but dropped quickly like it might bite if held for too long.  Nobody speaks.  Tavros coughs.

With a wistful sigh, Gamzee drops onto the mattress and ushers Tavros into his lap, patting the area next to him at the same time.  “Come on and sit down, motherfuckers.  You guys must have walked a whole long way to get to where you’re at now.”

Karkat shakes his head but goes to plop down next to Gamzee nonetheless, leaving you standing at the doorway with light silhouetting your form.  “Close the door and come on, then.”  Karkat tells you, so you do, closing the door, feeling like the air is thickening around you, choking you; a swamp of an atmosphere.

And moving to sit down, the silence seems far more obvious to you than silence ever has before.  If it weren’t for what little light leaking like pus through the cracks of the doorframe and the grubby windows, the noises of cars every so often that sound a thousand miles away, you’d be tempted to think you’d stumbled out of the day and into the dead of night.  It occurs to you then what it’s like to have no one trust you, to walk on your toes, to be almost prepared to run.  It occurs to you what these trolls must go through every day after experiencing it for only a few minutes.  It occurs to you that these are people, and that you have about as much experience of the world as a child half your age.

It’s not a pleasant epiphany.

When Tavros speaks, the silence doesn’t so much break and shatter.

“So, um, John.  How do you know Karkat, assuming that you know Karkat and you’re not, maybe, following him home, which would be odd, I think?”

Okay, well, that’s a weird thing to say.  You wonder briefly if all trolls are as… eccentric as the one’s you’ve met so far.  Only briefly, though.  Having three people of any kind, let alone trolls you just met, staring you expectantly for an answer has the ability to put one slightly on edge.

“To be honest, I don’t really know him that well,” you say with a chuckle and a long look down at your hands.  “I sort of helped him out after these jerks beat him up and he swore at me.  Then I saw him again today and he swore at me some more.”  You don’t really want anybody to think you’re that close to Karkat yet.  You like him, sure, he’s funny and passionate and interesting.  But maybe this isn’t the road you want to take.  Not yet.

“Swore at you?  Okay, brother, so you do know Karkat,” Gamzee lilts.

“You’d be swearing too if some bucktoothed moron decided to make you his business,” Karkat snaps with his knees brought up to his chest and his arms wrapped around them and locked together.

His friends snigger.  “Still, Karbro, this is a motherfucker that helped you out, so he’s alright by me.”  Karkat snaps his teeth at Gamzee as he leans in to you and mutters in a stage whisper.  “He don’t mean a thing by it, really.  I think he likes you.”

“I’m not a fucking pet, you deficient clown.”

His voice has less of an edge to it this time, and you take that as an invitation to join in the laughter.  And sitting there giggling as Karkat growls, some of the tension begins to dissipate, the thick, sticky mess of anxiety in your stomach oozing away into the air around you.

“He’s all words, he’s a caring motherfucker when he ain’t all snappy.  We got an ants nest somewhere here and this brother can’t be bringin’ himself to get rid of it.”  Tavros snorts, a short, ugly sound that sounds so right in the context, and Gamzee smiles offhandedly at Karkat’s surly face, a face that morphs into horror and is buried into greyish hands as he groans.  From this angle you can see the yellow tips of two small horns.

“Don’t tell him that!  What in almighty hell made you think it was a good idea to tell him that!”

Gamzee shrugs, still smiling.

“Do you have to fucking embarrass me all the time?”

“ ‘s a brother’s job, Karkles,”  Gamzee says lazily, that serene smile playing on his lips.

“Oh, Karkles,” you say, glancing to your right and the mortified, hunched frame next to you.  “You are the sweetest there is, Karkles.  It is you.”

“Let a meteor strike this place down, please,” Karkat mutters into his palms.  “Let every tiny piece of evidence that these people ever existed be flushed away from the land like the shits that they are.”

You don’t think your smile could get any wider hearing that.  It’s nice.  It’s companionable in a way you haven’t really felt before, being with these people.  They laugh at each other and with each other and there are no mottos or structure or stability keeping them from doing it.  Tavros and Gamzee are cuddled up pretty close, apparently inapprehensive about showing affection around you, as long as you’re with Karkat, at least.  A dim memory from biology class reminds you that trolls don’t really see gender as a thing when they get together, and while coming from the mouth of a teacher it had a certain alien quality to it, here it seems right.  It seems happy.  The house is squalid and the City around it is breaking, but contentment slips through the cracks.  It’s not perfect, but it’s okay, surely.  You wouldn’t mind living like this, you think.  Maybe your life needs changing, but theirs seems fine.  It seems right.

“Would you like tea, or coffee, or some other hot drink?  Although I don’t think we have any other hot drinks at the moment, which you’ll just have to deal with, I guess,” Tavros says, and you’re beginning to think that the hesitation in his voice is a constant and not just initiated by your presence.   Karkat snorts.

“He means do you want anything to drink.  You’ll get used to it.”

“Uh, yeah, that is probably what I was going for.”

“Sure, that sounds great!  Could I have coffee, please?”

Tavros nods and picks himself up to open the door to the room he just left.  The kitchen, probably.  And apparently the bedroom as well, you think, seeing the shape of a queen sized mattress opposite the bulky cube of an oven, hob and sink packed into a smaller space than you ever imagined they could fit.  Nothing else.  No cupboards, no drawers, no cakes.  And what is there is Spartan and, by the looks of it, barely functional.

With the waterfall of a kettle filling as background noise, Karkat coughs.  “So.  Are you okay?  You looks liked you were going to vomit yourself into a coma or something earlier.”  He keeps his eyes on the back of his hand, scratching it softly, looking at you from the peripheries of his vision.

You think it over for a second and bob your head.  For now, at least, you’re doing okay.

“Told you, brother.  This is one caring motherfucker we all up and managed to meet,” Gamzee states.  He pauses for a second before his songlike voice starts up again.  “You ever heard of pale romance?” he asks you.

“Nope.  Sounds like a troll thing.”

Gamzee chuckles a little and nods in that languid way of his.  “Yeah, I guess you could say that.  Only it sort of is and it sort of ain’t.”  He pauses to tap thoughtfully at his chin.  Or it could be thoughtful, except his indigo eyes are unfocused and bloodshot.  You forget exactly where indigo falls on the spectrum.

“It’s sort of like being best friends, like me and Karbro.  Only it ain’t exactly like best friends.  Like being more than best friends without the sex stuff, you get it?”  You just carry on staring, nonplussed.  “Like, you got a motherfucker who’ll listen to all your shit and shooshpap you if you’re ever feelin’ down and make you feel good about your fine self.  I dunno how many of them out there in the big world know about it, probably not a lot.  Probably not a lot of trolls know about it neither.”  He stops for a second to give an affectionate look at Karkat.  “But I’m pretty sure that this motherfucker all up and went pale for any brother or sister who don’t get their happiness on ‘cause of the world screwin’ them over.”

You look at Karkat, who is pointedly looking away.  “Oh.  Cool,” you say, while the oven gives a pained ding.  “Where did you hear that?”

Gamzee moves with an easy, languorous grace.  He carries on talking as he walks to the kitchen.  “Story Tav told me once.  Something ‘bout a pan.”

“Pupa pan,” Tavros’ voice clarifies with a giggle.

When Gamzee leaves you’re very aware of being alone with Karkat, and it’s your turn to give an awkward cough and scratch at the back of your hand.

“Thanks for inviting me.”

“I didn’t do a fucking thing,” he says, but you look up and he’s smiling.  “We can thank Terezi if we ever see her around somewhere.”  He meets your eyes, those red striations like blood fireworks.  You smile.

“Okay, when I see her I’ll totally do that.”  You linger looking at his eyes for a little. They really are different from anything you’ve ever seen before.  It’s sort of a shame when Karkat turns away to watch Gamzee and Tavros return, one with a steaming coffee in hand and one with a steaming, green pie.

“What in dicklicking fuck?”  You jump a little at his shout.  Wow, the guy can go from tender to angry in like half a second.  “You’re seriously eating sopor?  Now?  With John here?  You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, you were the one who said we had to treat him well, you imbecile!”

“Oh, sorry.  You want some, brother?”

“No he does not fucking want some!  Does sopor even work that way on humans?  Oh wait, who gives a flying shit!  You don’t invite someone you’ve just met to get high with you, you idiot.  Are you insane?”

“Plenty people get high with people they just met.” 

“Not in this fucking house they don’t.  Curb your enthusiasm to immolate the few remaining brain cells you have left at least as long as it takes John to get tired of us.”

And it’s just so ridiculous, watching Karkat of all people, a troll about as high off the ground as your chest, scream with such nearly incandescent rage at a 6 foot 6 monster that you start to laugh.  And then you can’t stop.  You’re pretty sure this isn’t what you should be doing, maybe it counts as being an enabler or something, but it’s very nearly hysterical.  Tavros seems to want to keep his distance when he sets the coffee down near you and clings a little to Gamzee’s arm.  Karkat looks at you like you’re a fly learning to tap dance.  You’re pretty sure you’re going to have to calm down.  So choking a little, waving your thanks at Tavros, you stifle yourself long enough to speak.

“You guys are so weird!  In a totally good way, though.”

Karkat huffs.  “Thanks, John.  I’m honoured.  Seriously, do you have a ribbon or a medal I can wear?  Shall I get ‘endorsed by John Egbert’ tattooed on my chest, along with a picture of your dumb face on my stomach?”

You laugh again before forcing yourself to calm down.  “Yeah!  Walk around shirtless for me when you get it!”  Pause.  “No, wait, that sounded weird.”

Blushing, you look up at the faces that beam down at you.  And for all their happiness, for all yours, you can’t get those words out your head.  The ones Karkat said like there was nothing more obvious and more tenuous that ever existed before.  ‘Help, I hope.’

And they won’t leave; they’re the bile rising in your throat and the guffaws echoing past your teeth.   They’re the giant, bellowing elephant in the room that you really can’t ignore anymore.  So you grit your teeth.  You open your mouth to speak.

“Listen.  This is great, you guys are really cool and I have sort of have friends like you in the next city over…”  You cough and gesture to Karkat.  “But it’s sort of bugging me, what you said, about changing things?  I don’t know if it can happen, dude.  Things are pretty okay as they are?  I mean, from where I’m standing, you guys look happy.”

The weight that presses down at your words is heavy, and for a second you regret saying anything.  The happiness was fine.  You wanted to stay that way forever.

No one says anything, and you can’t really bring yourself to look any of them in the face.  And after an awful stretch of you don’t know how long looking down at the ground, you finally hear the little mutant troll still standing in front of Gamzee utter something.  He barely raises his voice above a whisper, but that oppressive weight seems to silence everything again.  So you hear.  Even if you don’t want to.

“Do you really believe that?”

No.  “Yes.”

Silence.  Again.  More silence.

Karkat’s eyes are cold fevers.  “Tavros, show John your back.”

Your surprise makes you look up.

“Um.  I’d really rather not do that.”

“Tavros, just do it.”

“Please, Karkat.”

“Karbro,” Gamzee says, his voice tense, his face unusually grim.  “That ain’t something you all up and show a person out the blue.”

You don’t know what’s going on, but you can feel the cold rage radiating from Karkat in waves.  “It is when it’s important!” Karkat hisses, quiet at first.  But his voice rises and rises and rises.  “The closest thing we have to getting through to any human, the first one I’ve met who actually sees what’s going on a little and he _still_ doesn’t think things need changing.  Fuck that.  Tavros, show him your back.”

You don’t know what Karkat wants you to see.  You’re not really sure you want to see it.  Everyone is strung tight, that easy atmosphere from earlier gone, as if it was only ever illusory.  And you sit there, ignored even for the fact that you, apparently, are the subject of conversation.  You and Tavros.

Tavros whimpers.

“Tavbro, this ain’t somehtin’ you have to do, okay?  You don’t gotta let someone tell you what to do.”

He makes a noise, somewhere between a cough and a moan.  He looks from Karkat to Gamzee and then at you, straight at you, with a face unreadable for all its dejected expression.  And he turns around.  And he lifts his shirt.

There, from the shoulder blades to the small of his back, are two huge scars, opposite each other, jagged and faintly brown.  They’re not like slits, not like knife wounds or a fall onto something sharp, but rips, tears, two massive breaks in his body, boundaries the brown blooded boy seems to fall apart from.

You’re not breathing.  You can’t breathe.  You can’t speak.  And for a second, neither can Tavros.

Only a second.

“Wings,” he says simply, delicately.  “After puperty, I got wings.”

“Then what –“

“Ripped off,” says Karkat, anger falling away again, fading into another cycle of that extreme weariness.  “How old were you, Tavros?”

He takes a gulp, as if fighting away tears.  And for all the shakiness of his voice, it looks like he succeeds.

“Thirteen.  I only just got them.  I was – they pinned me down and –“ another unstable breath.  “They said I shouldn’t parade my mutations.  I thought I could hide the way I commune with animals.  But not this.  I had to run, or they would have – would have killed me.”

He drops his shirt.  Neither you or Gamzee say anything.  Karkat takes up the story.

“And then he spent the next four years on the streets, on the opposite side of the city where he didn’t know anyone, doing things and having things done to him you couldn’t stomach.”  Not harsh.  Just tired.  Just sad.

You don’t think you could stomach it.  You don’t think you can.

“And it’s not rare, John.  It’s the same for all of us.  We might not have scars on our backs but we’ve got scars everywhere else.  Things.  Need.  To change.”

You shake your head.  You feel your insides churning.  You stand up.  You back away.

You run.

You never did touch your coffee.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know why I make Tavros suffer so much, but boy at least we got some drama going on.


	6. The Tipping Point

Your name is Karkat Vantas, and you fucked up.  Of course, you recognise it too late, like you usually do.  It’s only as he flings the door open and speeds out into the stagnant day that you can see how well and truly fucked your up is. 

With the door open the room is flooded with light, and you can see his sweltering frame disappear between the shimmering, mirror-like puddles the heat makes from dips in the concrete road.  You want to shout after him, not necessarily to make him come back.  Not necessarily things that even border on kind.  You just want to tell him exactly what things to stick in which orifices, because who runs like that after seeing what he saw?  Why blind yourself like that on purpose?  You’d been so close, so close to catching him and getting it all to change.  Things had finally started to look up and you could smell that one, prolonged note of something new coming.  And now it’s gone, because you fucked up.  Even a wriggler could tell it wasn’t time to fly off the handle and show him things he couldn’t deal with yet.

But that’s what you are.  A stupid little wriggler.

A sniffling sound behind you pulls your gaze away from the door and its square of light.  Tavros is looking down, fisting watery brown tears away from his face and coughing ever so slightly.  A hint of your past self flares up in you, the urge to tell him to suck it up or something equally stupid and insensitive.  But it dies away and you’re left with only a wrench in your gut and a burning in your face and a deep, deep regret that you can’t push away.

“Tavros, I’m sorry.”  He nods.  “I needed to make him see.”

Tavros looks up at you for the smallest second.  His mouth is set but his eyes are wide and he looks a mirror of how you feel.  Unstable.

“That’s okay, I understand.  Or maybe I don’t, but I think I do.”  He wrings his hands together.  “I really need to be away, for a while.”

There’s a second where no one knows what to do with themselves before Tavros tips forward, away from Gamzee, following John into the day.  Gamzee turns his face helplessly to watch his boyfriend’s back dwindle.  Then he looks at you with an unpainted face and a frown that twists his features in such an alien way you feel a something rip itself out of you.  He follows Tavros.  You slam the door.  You’re left alone.

Dark seems darker when there’s no one to share it with, and loneliness is more apparent when you’re alone.  The space around you sings with void and the house settles unhappily and you feel yourself fall down onto the mattress and clasp your face in your hands, massaging deep circles into your eyes.  The day’s remembrances clutter loudly on top of each other and smother you, and it takes all your self-control not to groan out loud. 

In the frankly impressive depths of your stupidity, you’ve managed to piss off the only people who have ever cared about you.  The only people who ever accepted you, the only forms of light you have.  Fucking wonderful.  Is there anyone you can’t anger?  Is the Dalai Lama around?  He’ll be a whole fucking sight less holy when you’re done with him.  If anyone can bring a universal beacon of hope and understanding down to the level of shithive maggots, it’s you.  God, you’re an idiot.

They’re the first people who ever wanted you.  Trolls never know their parents, they’re hatched alone in some dark secluded place and expected to find others to band together with, usually their own age, some a bit older.  Maybe one or two adults can stomach a grub, but they’re few and far between.  If human rumours are to be believed, there are more than a few who can literally stomach a grub, but that’s slander and it’s the reason you showed him Tavros’ scars in the first place.

But you were never wanted, not by altruistic adults or gangs of children.  Your weird blood alienated you from everyone else, and that alienation only pushed you further into despising and rejecting their company.  So you were forced to live on your own.  ‘Live’ being the operative word.  You refused to die.  Even cold and alone, you refused to die.

You took what little food was left to rot in the trash cans of the city, or stole it from people who didn’t need it so much if you could get away without being caught.  Some trolls would pass and toss you scraps and your pride would only hold out until they were safely out of sight and you could take what they offered without embarrassment.  And despite all that, the daily, constant battle for survival, you know it was only slightly harder for you than it would have been for wrigglers in a group.  What you did on your own is what they did together.  And you survived long enough to work.  A lot of them didn’t. 

So you’d drift around with no set home, making sure all the harshness of everything around you found its mirror in your countenance, your demeanour.  When you were old enough, you would spend the occasional stint at some back alley ‘factory’ or running errands for groups of ‘bodyguards’ until you made everyone around you too angry or too sad to deal with you.  Then you’d move on to the next dying field and reap what you could from there.  Almost all work a troll can get close to home is illegal, but no one cares enough to stop it.  All the ones that could, well they have their world and you have yours, alien from each other and running smoothly and independently, the paradigm of stagnant stability.  And John was the loose nut, the thing that could have made the oil of one machine bleed surreptitiously into the other.

And you fucked it up.

Go you.

You massage your eyes with the heel of your hands and sigh.  Thinking about it, you don’t remember ever having a job where you’re supposed to register and stuff.  You doubt the government knows you exist.  It’s okay, though, you doubt the government knows about the existence of most trolls, not officially at least.  Except the ones with apartments or some other government sanctioned place to live that isn’t pieced together from shit found on the street.  It feels a little like rebelling, not taking the places they offer.  But sometimes the alternative is starving, or freezing, or being alone, and one small act of rebellion might not be worth that.  One unnoticed fuck you is about as useful as one unnoticed I love you.

You don’t remember those first years of wandering well, it’s one conglomerate mess of days in your mind, a way of living to survive that only people who are alone ever really experience, which you never really knew until Gamzee found you.  Because Gamzee found everyone. 

It’s the only incident that’s stuck with any reliability.  Close to giving up, a memory of being in pain, a sprained wrist, slouched against a wall and crying.  Or maybe you had already stopped, too tired, or realised there wasn’t any point in crying anymore.  You haven’t shed a tear since then anyway. 

Fuck, this is stupid, it doesn’t matter.  All that matters is that Gamzee found you.  He found you and asked you in that ridiculous honking way of his how you were “all up and motherfuckin’ doin’”.  And you told him to fuck off and let you die peacefully like the melodramatic stain on his patience that you are.  But he just laughed.  And for some reason you remember what he said next like it was in a dream.  With perfect clarity and like it may never have happened.

“Naw, no motherfucker deserves that.  No one wants to be alone, not really.  Come with me, I got a place you might like”.

He was older, but not by much.  He pulled you up, with you protesting, and dragged you away from that place in the City.  You wouldn’t have fought back even if you could.  Besides, Gamzee is strong, ridiculously strong for someone so slight.  Maybe it’s his blood.

And he took you home.

You still don’t know how old he is.  He’s like you, indeterminate, present tense, tied to the people around him and not the world he finds himself in.  Older, but you don’t think it matters.

You fall backwards onto the mattress.  He found you, and you lost him.  And God, you hope you can find him again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The length of this chapter does not justify the amount of time it took me. 
> 
> Although I'm pretty sure the next chapter is going to be the longest yet.
> 
> Anyway, I hope you're still enjoying this.


	7. Knock

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My deepest apologies for the lateness.
> 
> And a friendly reminder that I have a [tumblr](http://tavraost.tumblr.com/) for this where i can answer question about stuff you want to know and also keep you updated on my progress. It seems the easiest way of keeping you guys in the loop.
> 
> If that link doesn't work, you can copy and paste this url --> http://tavraost.tumblr.com/

Your name is John Egbert, and you… well you’re not sure what you are at the moment.

It’s been a day and a half.  A day and a half with the memory of those jagged, featherlike scars trapped in an already teeming mind.  A day and a half almost exactly, and you know because you’ve been counting every hour you couldn’t sleep.

It’s difficult to articulate what you’re feeling right now.  It’s like being trapped in a tornado and suddenly finding yourself in Oz.  And then being trapped there as well, in a world where the first word that comes to mind is ‘different’.  You’re torn in equal measures to explore and hide. 

The house stands easily identifiable in your memory (if it can be called a house.  You’re not too sure.  Maybe a hut?  A shed?  Is it offensive to call it a shed?)  Whatever, you remember the shed and its inhabitants, you remember Karkat and the bright red spokes of his grey irises.  You remember Gamzee and his half-lidded expression, you remember Tavros and his Mohawk and his scars.

It won’t leave.  The whole day’s remembrances keep swirling and choking and trapping you.  You’ve bitten your bottom lip raw in nervousness, and now, in the living room of your bleached white house, your eyes won’t rest on anything but the window and the afternoon sky and the sunless clouds.

Dad sits in his chair and you sit in yours.  The TV blares out a short PSA about something or other, and the words ‘Community.  Identity.  Stability.’ dance onscreen before fading away and being replaced by something equally uninteresting.  Your dad watches with glazed eyes.

The need to speak has never been more apparent to you, although you don’t know what to say, or why you want to say anything at all.

You cough, clearing your throat with the same universal sound that has served as a precursor to every awkward sentence ever said.  Your dad’s attention slowly drifts from the television to you.

You open your mouth, but you don’t get the chance to say a word before your dad starts talking.

“Son, I want you to know, man to man, that I love and support you no matter what, okay?”

“What?” you say, confused.  “I mean yeah, I know, thanks dad, but I think I was just going to ask you about that troll kid from the other day.”

“Oh.”  Your dad shifts slightly uncomfortably in his seat, reaches for his pipe and places it firmly between his teeth.  “I see.  I thought you wanted to talk about something else.  No matter, it’ll come up one day I’m sure.  What did you want to ask about, son?”  He’s lost interest in the TV, giving you his full attention.

You shake your head.  You depend on your dad, he’s a crutch that supports you and makes the unknown bearable, but wow, he sure is weird sometimes.  He brings his hand up to the bell of his pipe and takes it out as you pause to ponder what it really is you want to ask about.  It’s weird, that pipe hasn’t even got tobacco in it; your dad doesn’t smoke.  You think that maybe he likes playing with something empty once in a while.

“Uh, well, I just wanted to know what you thought about him.”

“Well…” he says, carefully.  “I’m proud of you for taking the time to help a thing in need.  What else is there?”

“No, I mean him.  Not how I helped him or anything, what do you think of him.  Like, as a person.”

Dad slowly brings the pipe back to his mouth, chewing it carefully, carefully.  According to the few business partners and work friends he’s ever brought home to discuss details entirely lost on you, you’re a lot like your dad.  You’re not so sure.  You’re not sure what you’re like.  You’re not sure you’re like anything at all.

He eyes you, a long piercing look that breaks your bones.  “John, I’m proud of you for helping the adolescent troll.  I’m proud of you for facing your fears like that, there aren’t many who would.  But you have to realise that they’re not like us.  Do you understand?”

“Dad, I didn’t face any fears.  What could he have done like that?  He was all beat up.  Besides, he was totally cool and not scary at all when I talked to him.”  You pause for a moment.  Dad remains silent, waiting for you to carry on your speech.  “And… what exactly is so bad about not being like us?  I mean, mostly they are like us.  They think and feel and stuff, and they have eyes and noses and all the other senses and maybe some extra ones.  They just look a little different and act a little different.  Why can’t they, you know, be with us?”

There’s an air of discomfort around him now, you can feel it from where you’re sitting.  He rubs his nose, grips onto his pipe with his teeth, picks his next words carefully.

“It’s just the way things are, son.”

“But the way things are is stupid!  That’s a really dumb argument, sorry dad.  It makes everyone think things are fine when they’re not, it’s just an excuse!  We’ve all been trapped in the same way of thinking and we don’t even realise it, and we probably won’t ever until something really big comes and knocks it all down!”

“Yes, perhaps you’re right, John.  But they are different.  They’re dangerous and unstable, they don’t have the same communities we do.  You don’t understand –“

“No, I don’t!” you shout with exasperation and a pinch of teenage angst.  “That’s sort of the point.”

The awkward silence is pretty much palpable.  It clogs your veins and thickens the air around you, trapping you in its unhappy claws.  Dad’s eyes are indecipherable.

“I need to do something,” you say.  “I’ll be back before dark, I think.”

He nods, slowly, slowly, carefully, carefully.  “Okay.”  He only hesitates a second before he speaks again.  “Son, I’m proud of you.  I’ll be proud of you no matter what, until the day I die and then I’ll carry on being proud of you.”  He hesitates for a moment.  “Please, be safe.”

You set your shoulders, set your jaw, stand at the door and open it.  “I will, Dad.”

 

* * *

 

The door to Karkat’s home seems taller and more imposing than it was last time, and you stand outside, trying to summon the courage to knock.  But every time you raise your fist, the memory of scars and running and your own panicked breath hits you, the way you escaped without a word, and you slowly lower your hand again.  You’re beginning to feel like a weird wind up doll, with no other actions than the ones prescribed and set in motion. 

You’re quite sure the neighbours are staring, too.  You can see them watching you from the periphery of your vision, though you can’t bring yourself to turn your head and properly face them.  They stare like sneaky little gossips from apartment windows, from behind mute walls and round drab, grey curtains.  Those without curtains blatantly appraise you.  It’s not a pleasant feeling, to be watched, but you can’t make yourself move forward and you’re not about to turn back.

With not too much fanfare, you realise that you’re stuck, and after all the time and effort it took to get here.  Not that you would admit to anyone that you got lost, but you sort of did get lost.  It worked out eventually, the local addicts were keen to help, even if the routes they provided were roundabout and frankly a little dangerous, because you’re here now.  And you would feel relief if you didn’t have an altogether unfamiliar wrench of anxiety playing carelessly around your sternum.  To turn back now, after all that, would feel like giving up platinum in favour of glass.  And yet you can’t bring yourself to move forward, can’t bring yourself to knock, to do anything except stand and raise your fist and lower it again in cycles over and over again.

Muffled voices leak through the walls and reach out to you.  The sound of a kettle boiling.  They grasp you with golden strings, invite you in. 

You’re not a coward.

You push that feeling of dread down, where it acts only as an underlying current to be ignored, and you knock. 

The voices stop.  The strings break.  The feeling surges wavelike in your chest again before you try hard to beat it back down.

The door opens.

A troll woman (or girl, it’s hard to tell) flings the door open with such arrogance and ownership you think for a second you might have knocked on the wrong door.  But how many other sheds or huts or hovels are there in the City that look like this one?  For the smallest amount of time, both of you stare at each other nonplussed.  And then both of you ask the same question.  Or rather, you blurt it with your usual tact and she proclaims it with disdain and utter confidence.

“Who are you?”

There’s a pause then, like missing the beat of a piece of music by a fraction of a second and having to deal with the dissonance both real and imagined that results.  And she laughs.  Haughty and high, and you can’t help but join her, the nervousness bubbling through you and emerging as windchime giggles.  Neither of you have the chance to answer, though, before Karkat pushes her aside and stands in front of you, arms crossed, stance defensive.

“Hi, Karkat,” you say, offering a sheepish smile.

He doesn’t make any reaction other than to scoff.  You chew your lip, feeling that feeling under his platinum gaze.

“Have you finally come to your slow-burning sense?” he says at last.  “Or is there another reason you’re loitering round my home like a lost puppy.  If the reason is the latter rather than the former, you are cordially invited to fuck off.”

“Gee, I don’t even have a date.”

He doesn’t laugh.  He looks like a barrier, a wall of short angry troll.  That scowl almost seems like it’s been tattooed on his face.  You shuffle uneasily.

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure I’ve come to my senses.”

It’s difficult to describe what happens next.  The short answer would be that Karkat smiles.  Karkat actually smiles.  It’s small and fast and broken and almost shameful, but he smiles and it’s so wonderful.  It’s a smile that leaves you happy and sad at the same time and a smile that makes you wonder why he doesn’t smile more often.  And it’s a smile that makes you realise that you’ll never understand, not properly, why he smiles so little.  Not something you understand, but something you can change.  Hopefully.  Smiles look so radiant on him you want him to smile all the time.  That broken twist of his lips makes you want to grin in return.

The long answer could carry on for years.

In the future, when you look back past the dust and rubble, you will determine this as the starting point.  But for now it just is, and the angled eyebrows and sneering pout are back as if they had given up on trying to recall a lost memory.

He tuts, but it’s gentle and familiar.  “Come on, then.”

The inside is just as sparse as you remember it, but not bare.  Five trolls all turn their eyes to you, or four do and Terezi points her head in your general direction.  Her omnipresent smirk grows wider.

“Something smells like blueberries,” she trills.  “I told you he’d come.”

“Yes,” Karkat says, that air of intense annoyance you’d noticed before surrounding him like it had come home at last.  “Once again you’ve proved your immense cognitive skills and foresight in a way that’s so fucking irksome it actually makes me want to disembowel myself.  Thank you, Terezi.”

She sniffs bad temperedly while the troll who answered the door snorts.  She whips her hair away from her face and for a second you can see her left eye past the glasses she wears.  Blue, slightly darker and more washed out than your own, but just as intense.  It has seven pupils. 

“You’re such a charmer, Karkat.  Introduce us, then!”  She waves around at the little group, most gathered on or near the mattress in varying degrees of relaxation.  Only you, Karkat and the troll woman/girl stand, and you begin to feel out of place, that anxious feeling at the back of your throat making itself known to you again, ebbing and eating away at your thoughts.

Karkat rolls his eyes.  “You know everyone else,” he says to you, jerking his head to the group in the centre of the room.  “And this, John, is spiderbitch.  Spiderbitch, this is John.  Play nice, don’t eat him, it’ll probably make a mess of your hair or something.”

You gulp and remember a few of the more unpleasant rumours about trolls.  But really, you don’t have much time to dwell on it, because Spiderbitch (Spiderbitch?  What kind of name is that?) has grabbed your face in her hands, puffing up your cheeks and playing with you like you were a baby.

“I’m not going to kill him, he’s such a little _cutie!_ ”  The dramatic way she draws out her vowels makes you feel like she’s laughing at you.  But she’s looking at you in a way which could be construed as kind, and you’re not and never have been the type to judge a person for laughing.  So when she lets go, you check your face for damage and then offer her a smile and your hand.

She takes it daintily.  “My name’s Vriska, by the way.  Karkat’s being an asshole, as usual.”

Karkat bears his teeth at her, a distinctly troll thing to do which reminds you how distinctly troll-like your surroundings are.  “I’m so thoroughly burned.  You’ll forgive me if I don’t flip my shit, I’m too covered in raw scorch marks to even think about moving it.  It’ll just have to lie there unflipped as I moan in pain from the power of your sick, sick burns.”

“Ugh, you’re making me regret coming now.”

“I never even fucking invited you!”

“That’s not the point.”  She turns to you and smiles, pointedly ignoring a fuming Karkat, baring her sharp teeth in a way that makes you nervous both that she’ll either bite you or hug you.  There’s really not a lot that wouldn’t make you nervous at the moment, though.  It makes you think or sharks.  “We can be friends, John.  Don’t you think?”

“Yeah,” your voice catches on the word and you cough to clear it.  “Yeah, I think we could be friends.”

“ _Good._ ”

Terezi, evidently bored of the small conversation that had started between the others and of waiting for you to finish yours, coos a greeting which you hastily return.  It breaks the two near her from their isolated bubble of chatter, and Gamzee gives you a characteristically lazy wave while Tavros nods and avoids eye contact.

It’s very difficult to know what to say, or to know if you should say anything at all.  Karkat and Vriska have descended into fatuous argument and you stand next to them, like a puzzle piece from an entirely different jigsaw that doesn’t fit but is being jammed in nonetheless.  It’s only when Terezi tells them to shut up and sit down that you feel you’re allowed to move anywhere.

Vriska and Karkat shoot each other glances as they move to take their places.  Karkat goes to sit by Terezi.  They’re close.  That roaring feeling of sickliness returns and ebbs and returns again.

You take a deep breath.  Now or never, you guess.

“I just wanted to say I’m sorry about what happened, when I ran off and stuff.  But if it’s any consolation, I do really want to help.  Like, I really want to help with whatever you think will change things.”  Vriska leans back on her arms with a gaze both perspicacious and gleeful, the same mischievous glee you feel before a prank or some other shenanigan.  It’s not so much directed at you as the entire room, like everything here falls under her doman and she can mess with it how she will.  You decide, maybe, in some way, you might like Vriska.

Gamzee chuckles.  You’d hardly even noticed him there, lying sprawled against Tavros and taking up the entire mattress between the two of them; it’s difficult to tell where one begins and the other ends.  But looking at them now, they’re so obviously a part of one another it’s difficult not to see how in love they are.  Maybe it’s not the love you know, maybe it is, either way it’s okay.  Because it’s still some kind of love, and you don’t have to understand it fully to know that it’s right, just like you don’t have to understand or experience everything Tavros went through to know that it’s wrong.  The things outside your experience don’t stop existing just because you haven’t experienced them.

You think maybe you should have realised that earlier, before you ran off like a child.  But that’s what you are.  Still a stupid little child, really.

“That’s sort of what we’ve been getting our chat on about,” Gamzee says, motioning for you to join the crowd.  It seems to you that all the seats have been taken, except for a conspicuous gap near Vriska which everyone has tried their best to avoid.  What Gamzee says throws you a little.  It makes you slightly ashamed to admit it to yourself, but you hadn’t actually expected anything to seriously happen.  Not that you didn’t want it to, it’s just that a hovel, five trolls and a human barely old enough to drive didn’t exactly seem like the most promising start to world change. 

You move to take the open space next to Vriska, opposite Terezi.  Karkat sits on Gamzee’s legs nect to her.  You try to slip into the conversation, with tentative voice and tentative person.  “So, have you thought of anything?  And sorry, but what exactly are you two doing here?”  You motion to Terezi and Vriska.

Karkat gives you a derisive snort.  “To answer your first question, no.  We’ve had all the bright ideas of a fucking amoeba.  To answer your second question, Vriska,” he spits rather than says the name, “heard everything that happened and decided to come over.  She managed to rope Tavros into discussing things, what a fucking surprise, and Gamzee joined in after realising how intrepidly stupid he would be to not even bother thinking about it.  And now here you are, a human with such low IQ you actually lower the average brain cell count amongst us to minus numbers.”

It’s weird how Karkat’s words can feel both angry and affectionate, like a viscious puppy.  It makes you want to laugh.  But the feeling disappears when Terezi nudges him in a familiar gesture that makes your stomach twist a little.  “Don’t be rude, Karkles!  And shut up, we’ve had plenty of ideas!  None of them are good, a few are a little illegal, but we still have ideas.”

“Whatever.”  He looks at you as he begins rubbing his temples, as if he can already envisage the answer to whatever question you’re going to be asked will give him a migraine so enormous he’ll beg to have both of you put down, to spare anyone else the memory of the pain.  “Have you got any stellar ideas hiding away in that underfed brain of yours?”

You laugh.  “No, not really.  I just wanted to help.  I mean, I’ve got connections with other humans.”  A thought occurs to you.  Hesitantly, carefully, you speak your next words.  “I also know a couple of mutant guys I think would want to get in on this.  They’re, um… they’re a little human, though.”

Silence.  Then Vriska shrieks.

“ _You’ve_ been talking to human mutants?  The boy who walked out with a word when he saw sad little Pupa’s scars? _Really?_ ”  You pout.  Vriska stands on a knife edge between you liking her or disliking her.  It’s only the fact that she doesn’t really seem to care that leaves you puzzled as to what to think.

“You’ve been talking about me,” you say to Karkat, accusatory, a little hurt.

“It’s hard not to when you’re the first human to acknowledge us for more than ten seconds for any other reason than to give us bruises.”

You sigh.  “Okay.” You pause to think. “How do you even know about human mutants, anyway? I didn’t think anyone knew about them, other than me, I guess.  Like it was all covered up by the government and stuff.”

Karkat groans and puts his face in his hands, like the promised migraine had come, and mutters something like “fucking typical.”  Weird.

“Uh, sort of everyone, you know, knows about them in some way,” Tavros mutters.  It’s the first time he’s spoken, and you get the feeling he’s saying things less for you than for him.  “I mean, everyone who is in some way defective, like I guess we supposedly are.  Including you, now, because maybe you are fraternising with other people who are also defective.”  He doesn’t look away from his shoes the entire time he talks, which annoys you for some reason.  And hey, you’re not defective!  Rude.

Gamzee pats his head.  “You ain’t defective, Tavbro.  Ain’t no one in this room defective.”

It clicks.  Finally.

“You mean there are human mutants here?” you shout, causing Vriska to jump and look contemptuously at you.  “In this city?”

It’s difficult to decide which reaction you should be more offended by, Terezi’s cackle or Karkat’s utterance of “Christ, you’re slow.”  Although quite honestly, you don’t really have the time to be offended, not with another cannonball of realisation slamming you in the gut.

“They blend in well most of the time,” Terezi says, leaning forward and grinning her jack-knife grin.  “And if they can’t, they know better than to run about the good streets.”

You lean back, shaking your head.  If in ever living your life you had stopped to think, it had never been for long.  And now, all at once, the thoughts won’t stop, moving like starlings and latching you irrevocably to the present.  This week has not been kind to you.  Really, you should have put two and two together and realised Dave and Jade couldn’t be the only ones.

Your voice is altogether more shaken when you offer your return.

“So I guess that means I should get in touch with them?”

Karkat clacks his tongue, letting it fall from the roof of his mouth to the floor.  “Maybe.  Later, when we know what the whisperfuck we’re going to do.”

This is, it seems, an invitation for ideas, but as it happens all that follows is a contemplative silence.  People sit and scratch their heads.  Ideas sail through minds in rather the same way as dumbbells sail through water.  And to your left, Vriska is clenching her teeth.  Eventually, she emits a loud groan.

“You’re all so stupid!” she says, as if accusing you of stealing all her worldly goods.  “Why don’t you just go out and talk?  Like maybe normal people do about ideas? I mean come on, we’re enough to get to the troll and pale mutt population, and Johnny boy here can get the message out to any human that wants to listen.  Eventually we’ll be able to recruit enough people to get a proper meeting together.  It’s not that hard! And honestly, it’s not like we’ll be arrested if we’re careful.”

“Pale mutt?” you ask about the same time Karkat says something foul mouthed about what kind of meeting place a group of trolls and a human boy are likely to get.

Vriska brings her jaw forward and looks to the roof, crossing her arms as if in thought.  Tavros, meanwhile, takes pity on you, mouthing ‘human mutant’ in answer to your question.  You mouth a little ‘oh’ back. 

“Ugh, we’ll sort something out.  There’s hundreds of places in the city we could use, we just have to think about it for a little while.”  She pauses, looking around and eventually resting her eyes on you.  “Well?”  she asks, smiling.  Shark teeth.

“Um, I don’t really know if I can get the message out that far, but I’ll try.”  In truth you’re not sure you can get the message out at all, but you promised you’d help and the least you can do is make an attempt.

Vriska claps her hands.  “Perfect.  We’re finally getting somewhere.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You remember how i said this chapter would be the longest yet? I lied.
> 
> And now I can drop my formality 
> 
> HOLY SHITTING MONKEYS, 50 KUDOS AND 1000 HITS? WOW GUYS, THANK YOU SO MUCH, THIS IS WAY MORE THAN I EXPECTED, EVEN THOUGH I KNOW IT'S NOT TOO MUCH. BUT YEAH I AM INDEBTED TO EACH OF YOU PERSONALLY FOR TAKING THE TIME TO READ THIS. MAN, YOU GUYS ARE GREAT.


	8. Act of Union

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fluff? Or the closest thing this fic has to it. Metafluff.

Your name is Karkat Vantas, you have just woken up, and the last two weeks have been Hell and Heaven.

It’s been a cognitive nightmare trying to organise such a disparate and random group and push them into action, but it’s a rush to see it coming together.  Not so much in a way a plan comes together, but more in the way magnets do, slowly at first but with exponential speed, with the end result being a mess of silver metal stuck fast and unmoving. 

You’ve managed to fall into a somewhat comfortable routine.  You’d wake up at dawn and listen to the early morning news on your radio, watching the sun rise in its imperceptible way past the canyons of life and movement in the City.  You sort of wish you’d taken up smoking at some point in your life, just so you could lean out the window and puff out toxic gas and look like a fucking badass while the City wakes up around you.  You’d look like self-destruction had found a home in a stocky, horned troll, with the easiest way to kill yourself burning slowly and pretentiously from your lips. 

But no, as it was the sun in its rising was the only onlooker, and you didn’t really have much time to be image-conscious anyway.  Although, in truth, you spent more time than you ever did before on how you looked.  It had been, ironically, Terezi’s idea.  Brush yourself up, make yourself look good and you might be able to feign charisma.  Nothing attracted people and brought them together like charm, even if you had all the charm of a garish and slightly charred curtain.  You spent a couple of minutes looking in the mirror each day, trying to make sure everything about you was right, until you gave up and told yourself looking good was fucking dumb and probably brought more trouble than reward anyway.  Look at Tavros.

It’s sort of weird, actually, how much difference two weeks and a cause had made in Tavros.  He’s more confident, less likely to jump half a mile in the air and splutter like a backed up fucking car engine.  He’s finally found something to be, touring the streets around your home with Gamzee and Vriska.  (Vriska, in her eternal bitchiness, had basically ripped Tavros’ arm off when you’d told everyone to find a partner and convince people to get off their lardy, disgusting asses and do something about the state of fuckery the world is in.  And Gamzee, due to his brilliant deductions which could only ever have been pulled off by anyone, had realised that he’d better go along with them if he didn’t want Tavros attacked, insulted, groped or some combination of all three).

It’s an odd combination, and one you’re not sure will work forever, but the three of them have managed to pass on the message to any troll or pale mutt that will listen.  Between Vriska’s abrasiveness, Gamzee’s distance and Tavros’ earnestness, things had gone well so far.

You could punch your past self in the ever-deserving face for thinking of Tavros as a coward for even a second.  When the day was out and he’d be falling asleep in the other room, Gamzee would grin proudly and describe how he told his story, showed his scars, both real and metaphorical, convincing anyone he could to join what you had hesitantly called a protest and be in the marketplace for next Wednesday.  Revealing yourself like that for the sake of something, making yourself vulnerable even if you don’t want to.  That’s brave.

And then Gamzee’s face would fall slightly, and his shoulders would drop, and he’d tell you how many trolls showed their scars in return, and how ‘motherfuckin’ difficult it is to see sometimes.’  It’s times like that when he seems both at his most sober and at his highest.  Like he’s a million miles away and almost breathing in your ear.  Although, you don’t think you’ve ever seen Gamzee sober, so there’s nothing to compare it to.  He’s told you it’s not a pretty sight.

After watching the sky change from its mess of colours to its beautiful blue, you’d take care of hygiene and wait.  Terezi and Vriska don’t bother to knock, but they don’t bother to stay quiet either, so it’s easy to tell when they’ve come.  Terezi likes to purposefully knock a few things over while Vriska will rattle the walls and almost make the home shake with her stomping.  They’re like a pair of kids in the terrible twos, completely ridiculous and about as welcome in the morning as a pinecone to the rectum.  And when they arrive, it means there’s only one last jigsaw piece to bring the puzzle together.

So together you wait, waking Tavros and Gamzee with your arguments until there’s a knock on the door and you rush to open it.  He’s come almost every day since the plan was hatched, always near noon, always smiling.  And as grating as it had been to see his blissfully vacuous face the first few days, it had grown on you to the point where every minute closer to midday would increase your irked mutterings and frustrated twitches until he arrived, and it would all melt away to be replaced by the possibilities of the day when you saw his face.

But he was still annoying as fuck, that’s not a thing that changed.

John has been… well, he’s been completely and utterly _John_ about this; always appearing with that bright smile and happy-go-lucky attitude that makes you want to vomit on the shoes of everyone within a five mile radius.  He’s been a shining, iridescent ray of midday sun to compliment your slightly sticky, sort of greasy brand of new hope.  He was, and is, and probably always will be, a dreamy breath of air.

He goes out of his way to help people, he stops and talks to the broken trolls of the streets, he takes lost looking humans by the arm and asks them where they’re going.  It almost seems like he’s detached himself from distinguishing between troll and human, all he sees is people who need help from him and people who need help from someone else.  He smiles, he beams, he actually laughs at the angry tirades you release on the vicinity at every chance you get.  And granted, it had infuriated you the first couple of times because who in Satan’s bottomless fuckhole finds what you say funny?  But John gives his breezy smile and you have to give one back and eventually you’re laughing, even happy, and everything seems right.

He teamed up with you and Terezi pretty quickly due to his mysterious aversion to six foot four juggalo’s, spiderbitches and unintentionally rude brownbloods.  So every day you’ll plan a route with Terezi and try to get to as much of the City as you can between the six of you and John will bound around the slums like an excited little puppy, asking anyone you pass whether they’re interested in change, like some fucking door to door salesman.

But today is different.

Yesterday, Terezi said she had some “very important, very interesting things which only I can do and which means I must regrettably leave you and John alone tomorrow for an entire day with no one to chaperone.” And you told her in return that if she was insinuating what you thought she was insinuating then she could wrap that sentence in razorblades and stick it elbow deep into her nook.  You also may have told her that there is no way you and John could be left alone for the day because Jesus fuck what are you supposed to say?  What if he doesn’t have fun or something and just leaves? 

She just cackled and told you to suck it up.

“You’re recruiting for a protest against the status quo, Karkat, not going to see a romantic movie.”

So fuck, yeah, today is different.

As these first few thoughts call you from sleep, you watch the dawn’s pastel colours leak seamlessly into your home.

You had dreamt of the sky.

 

* * *

 

John arrives a few minutes after Gamzee and the others leave.  You fiddle needlessly with your hair for a few seconds before taking a deep breath and opening the door.

John stands smiling (as if that’s a fucking surprise), a human-shaped silhouette against your doorframe.  His hands are balled loosely in his pockets, he stands straight and tends to look up every other sentence, even if the only person he’d possibly need to look up for would be Gamzee.  His grin is absent minded, but it perks when he sees you.

“Hi, Karkat!”

“Shut up, John.”

He giggles. “Rude.”

“Whatever, I’m rude, I don’t exactly make a point of being an old empire aristocrat.  If I was I’d probably have ended up sending one of my many servants to kill you already so I didn’t have to put up with you.  Or maybe I’d manipulate your family into sending you out into the wastes with a camera so I can watch as you slowly starve to death.  No, wait.  Shut up, John, we’re supposed to be doing business, fuck.”

“I’ve said like three words since I’ve been here, dude,” John says, with a quirked grin and bright eyes.  “Well, more now, since I just said that sentence.  And even more now, I guess.”  He laughs.

“No, fuck you, John.  I am not taking the bait.  Here is the bait, and here I am not taking it, so fuck you for even trying to goad me when you know damn well how easy it is for a colossal fucking mistake like you.”

“I thought we were here on business?”

You throw your hands into the air with an impoverished sort of movement, as if his presence saps the strength from your bones.  “Yes!  Fuck, we are.  Jesus, okay.” 

"I can see your horns."

"What?"  He giggles.  You ruffle your hair bad temperedly, making sure it covers the gold peaks of those little keratin mounds.  You make a noise somewhere between a huff and a sigh.  “Just, shut up for a second John, and listen.  We’re going out west today, which means we’ll probably have to go through a couple of human streets.  And that means you have to stay at least ten metres in front or behind me at all times.”

John looks for a moment completely and ridiculously crestfallen.  “Aw, what?  Why?  We never had to do that in the troll streets.”

You clench your teeth.  “Because at least in the troll streets some of the more stupid denizens of our quaint little hellhole might take you for a pale mutt or something if you’re with me and won’t try and hurt you.  On the human streets, both of us are going to get fucking beaten if we walk around together like we’re the prince and his blushing fucking bride.”

“You’re the bride, right?”

“I can be whatever you want me to be, John,” you say, exasperated.  And then, “no, wait.  Fuck!  Not like that.  Shut up!”

He’s already laughing though, like windchimes in breezes, and it sets you on edge and it gets rid of the nervousness in a strange sort of way, so that soon you’re barking your own broken laugh, trying to stifle yourself long enough to get moving, get going.

“Just… come on!  Jesus what did I do to deserve this.”

 

* * *

 

The middle of the week means the streets are fairly quiet; not silent, but not the bustling activity of the weekend.  People carry on their dreamless ways with a lazy reluctance, with fallen faces and broken gaits.  The crowd thins closer to the human streets, but the activity heightens, so that every individual seems to be expanded the nearer you get to the brightly lit roads of human inhabitancy. 

John, for his part, seems to have shut the everloving fuck up.  He fidgets as he walks and looks around him often, as if he’s taking in new sights that haven’t made sense to him up until now.

“Have you never been this far west?” you ask.

He laughs nervously.  “No.  I’ve never been further west than the marketplace.  It’s weird, I just never thought about it ‘til now.”  He gives a hapless shrug.

“Fine, I guess I’ll go in front then,” you say irritably.  “Of course you’ve never been further west than the marketplace, what was I thinking.”

“Hey, I never had reason to.  My school’s only a couple of blocks away and most of my friends live in a whole different city.”

“Well why don’t you visit your friends in this city, then?”

“I am.”

“Oh.”

An awkward pause opens up like an elephant shaped flower as your mind grapples with how best to reply to him.

“Uh, yeah.  I guess you’re my friend too.  Not that it was ever in question or anything, just I know that I can be the biggest asshole in a city that is basically one giant asshole.  Actually, it’s more like my default.  I am asshole one, the first and the greatest.  Sorry.”

John lets go of a chuckle and punches you lightly on the shoulder.  “Are you feeling that thing Gamzee was talking about, Karkles?  Pale, I think?  Are you pale for me?  You’re totally pale for me.”

You punch him back.  Harder.  “Don’t be a dickweed, John.  I’m not even sure Gamzee wasn’t just making shit up again.  And it’s not like Tavros wouldn’t believe in that fairy, idealistic shit.  If anything I’m as pitch black for you as the hole where my heart should be.”

“What?” John replies, eloquently.

“Black.  Like black romance?  Jesus, sometimes I forget you’re an idiot human with no knowledge of any other culture than your own stilted excuse for one.  Actually, no I never forget that, it’s just less obvious sometimes.”

“Okay, so what’s black romance?”

“Ugh,” you think for a second about how to explain this best to a human.  “Firstly, I guess the more formal name is kismesitude.  And it’s when you really, really hate someone.  So much you want to have sex with them.  You don’t want them to die or anything but it’s sort of nice to see them suffer, as long as you’re the one making them suffer, and that’s pretty healthy to a relationship from time to time.”

“Wow.   That’s weird.  Is that what you and Vriska have got going on?”

You splutter a little bit and stop in the road from shock.  “What?  No!  Can’t you use your fucking eyes or something?  I hate her as platonically as it gets.  And so should everyone else in the world.”

“Well, I was just thinking –“

“No, never think.  Don’t think, John, you’re not good at that.  Leave the thinking to people who have at least two brain cells and five synapses.  Everyone will be a lot happier.”  You carry on walking.

“Whatever.”

You think for a second you might have hurt his feelings, but you don’t have time to dwell on it.  The human zone proper starts at the next corner, and you have to make sure John hangs back a little so you can walk across safely.  It should take all of five minutes to cross into safer territories, but you’re still nervous.

You bustle into the throng quickly, a battleground waiting to happen.  You don’t look back at John, you keep your eyes on the floor, and you’re sure you can feel the stares drill into your grey-tinted skin.   An old woman hanging outside an apartment complex fairly similar to the one’s back home, except this one is beige, not grey, spits on the ground as you pass. You’re not sure if it's symbolic or she just really felt the need to spread her rank saliva all over the macadam as you passed.  Either way you don’t even pause.  You turn a corner, then another one, then finally into the no man’s land of alleyways, with the mute protectors of grey flats rising in a mirror to the ones near your home.  John arrives a few seconds later.

“Wow that lady was a butt,” he says, looking back at the woman staring after them.

“Don’t worry, I’m used to it.”

“Yeah, well, she’s still a butt.”  He looks at you for a moment, gives you a furtive glance.  “So were you and Terezi black together or something?”

You feel a hot flush in your face and turn away, walking quickly.  “Personal.”

“Oh, hey, I didn’t mean to be invasive or anything.   Just wondering.”

You sigh a little and look up to what little you can see of the sky.   Cloudless summer blue, afternoon brightness.  It couldn’t hurt to tell him.  Maybe.

“I was an idiot about it.  I wanted to be everything with her.  I kept trying to flip us between pitch and flushed.  Flushed is sort of like your thing.  But all I did was end up sending her mixed messages and making both of us confused and being the colossal ass I so definitely am.  And yeah, that’s it.  She stopped talking to me for a while afterwards.  So now you know, please never fucking mention it again.”

John doesn’t speak for a while; you can see him physically chewing over your last titbit of information and for a second you get stupidly scared that you’ve said entirely the wrong thing.

“I don’t think you’re that much of an ass,” he says, looking you in the eyes.  “Maybe 60% ass, but not all ass.”

You smirk a little, but a thought crosses your mind and your smile wavers.

“I don’t know how I’m going to do this, John.  I can’t get a handle on my own fucking love life, I’m love’s equivalent of a seven car pileup.  Screaming, babies flying from prams, explosions and all that fucking shit.  That’s what I am.  Just how the fuck am I supposed to lead a fucking _rebellion_ when I can’t keep a steady relationship.”

You don’t really expect an answer, all you were doing was venting your own self-loathing onto the nearest accessible thing with ears.  But he stops you all the same.  He grips your arm and spins you around and looks at you.

“You’re going to be great.  You’ve already done this much!  I mean, we’ve found loads of people who want to turn up and I wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for you, man.  Don’t be dumb, Karkat.”

He stands rising, a full head taller than you and smiles like an idiot down at you.  Gentle and caring and utterly sickening.  But you smile back up like a slightly less idiotic idiot all the same.  The sky is blinding.  You realise he’s still got your arm in a grip.  You realise you don’t care.

 

* * *

 

Dusk comes slowly, with soft steps and a hand that rests gently on your shoulder.  It encroaches with care, with gentle, lying caress as you curl on your motheaten, piece of shit mattress in your room.  You’d found only six people who expressed even a passing interest in turning up next Wednesday, but you still can’t stop smiling.

Gamzee, Vriska and Tavros had more luck in the south east, but you still think your day was a success.  And you have to constantly berate yourself that the possibilities of the day are only ever that, possibilities.  But you can’t keep the memory of that information in your head for long.  It leaves like wistful, aching breezes from your empty head.

You are smiling.  It makes your face hurt.  You think you’ve smiled more in the past two weeks than any other time in your life.  Smiling has never been part of your nature, but even with all the stress that comes from having to push such a disparate, random group of people into action (with some help from Terezi, you guess), you smile until it aches like something lost.

The broken streets of the city sing with the tintinnabulation of streetlights flickering, something close to the windchimes of John’s laugh, although everything sort of sounds like him in some way.  Night is coming.

You don’t remember falling asleep.  All you do is close your eyes and dream.

Night is coming.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's been almost two weeks since my last update wow i am a bad person.
> 
> on the bright side, i'm going to upload chapter 9 and chapter 10 a day apart, seeing as I've already written chapter 10, and both are very short chapters, so hopefully they'll be up pretty soon.
> 
> we're way over halfway done, guys, and then part 2 rears its ugly head.
> 
> I'm giving myself until the end of september to finish Under Your Bed.


	9. Moving Forward, Looking Back

\-- ghostlyTrickster [GT] began pestering turntechGodhead [TG] \--

GT: dave  
GT: dave, dave, dave.  
GT: dave, dave, dave, dave, dave, dave, dave, dave.  
TG: for the love of god egbert im here calm the fuck down  
TG: is it really that hard to wait two minutes for an answer  
TG: of course it is who am i kidding you probably started crying after thirty seconds without a response  
GT: hehehe, i am already tearing up, dave. it is just so difficult without you.  
TG: good  
TG: can whatever this is wait though harley and i are sort of getting ready for something  
GT: what something?  
TG: were going to the magical land of mind your own business  
GT: jeez, okay.  
GT: i just need to ask you something really quickly though.  
TG: how quick  
GT: totally the quickest thing. there will never have been anything quicker.  
TG: are you sure  
GT: i swear on my endless supplies of mangrit that this will be so quick it will burn your eyebrows off.  
TG: wow  
TG: you swear on ALL that mangrit?  
TG: seems like im going to have to take you seriously here  
TG: but i swear john if this isn’t quicker than you are when you see a photo of nic cage there will be consequences  
GT: dave.  
GT: ew.  
TG: you were saying  
GT: oh yeah!  
GT: okay, so i know this is really short notice and everything, but do you think you’d be able to get into my city in like three days time?  
GT: i would have asked you earlier but i have been sort of distracted.  
TG: gee i dunno egbert  
TG: aint exactly easy for weirdos like me and harley to just skip town  
TG: well probably dehydrate in the wastes without a car or anything  
GT: aw, really? can’t you get someone to drive you?  
GT: like, i mean if that’s possible for people like you.  
GT: is that possible? are you even allowed cars?  
GT: wow i know fuck all, don’t i?  
TG: okay in answer to your last question yes  
TG: in answer to your second no  
TG: there aren’t exactly a surplus of people willing to risk carrying illegal mutants across the wastes, past two checkpoints and into a new city  
TG: and in answer to your first  
TG: nah im totally pulling your chain we were planning to go anyway  
GT: what?  
TG: yeah we heard a couple of stories about some stuff going on over there  
TG: thought we might as well go  
TG: i mean were running out of kibble treats for harley over here  
TG: its only so long until she starts gnawing at my arm  
GT: hehehe, does jade really eat dog treats?  
TG: yeah all the time  
TG: she says they taste of chicken  
TG: i told her that was a cliche joke and it was ridiculously unfunny  
TG: like not even ironically unfunny  
TG: lucifer keeps that joke locked up in the seventh circle of hell just to torture the shit out of people he doesnt like  
TG: but yeah were going see you in three days whatever  
TG: later  
GT: no dave, wait!  
GT: what are you talking about?  
GT: like, i think i might know what you are talking about.  
GT: but just to be sure tell me what you are talking about.  
TG: nah  
GT: dave, come on!  
GT: we’re bros. bros tell each other bro things.  
GT: like why one bro is illegally skipping town and trying to make a new life in a completely different city under the nose of the empire.  
TG: jesus fuck  
TG: fine  
TG: but i swear to god if you tell anyone about this i will make sure you disappear completely  
TG: ill only leave one of your dumb buckteeth as a momento to your father  
GT: deal. i don’t even know who i would tell.  
TG: theres been some whisperings about rebellious goings on in your city  
TG: nothing too big okay so dont freak out  
TG: just some grumpy troll with dangerous ideas stirring up shit  
TG: which means a rebellion might happen  
TG: no strider alive is ever allowed to pass up a possible rebellion under any circumstance  
TG: and since im the only strider alive i guess that responsibility falls to me  
TG: but youll probably be fine in the dream of your idyll so dont worry about it  
GT: woah. how do you know about all that?  
TG: not just humans and cargo that travel between cities egbert  
TG: secrets do too  
TG: is that enough now can i go  
GT: hehehe oh yeah sure  
GT: you are totally free to go because i ABSOLUTELY DO NOT have any more information about your rebellion  
TG: what  
GT: i’m just saying that there is ABSOLUTELY NO WAY I AM OR HAVE EVER BEEN A PART OF THIS REBELLION  
TG: what  
TG: …  
TG: no  
TG: youre shitting me  
TG: oh my god  
TG: is this why you wanted me in your city  
TG: no  
TG: i cant deal with this

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] ceased pestering ghostlyTrickster [GT] \--

GT: dave?

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering ghostlyTrickster [GT] \--

TG: i

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] ceased pestering ghostlyTrickster [GT] \--

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering ghostlyTrickster [GT] \--

TG: im having a sort of mini freakout over here  
TG: this cant be true  
TG: you john egbert prince of surburbia and heir transparent to the throne of middle class are not getting involved with an underground movement vying for equality  
TG: are you shitting me  
TG: is this a dream  
TG: is this one of my fucked up dreams  
TG: no because then it might happen or might have happened or might be happening in real life  
TG: and there is no way in hell that this is happening or will ever happen  
TG: oh my god john  
GT: woah, dave, are you okay?  
TG: im peachy john  
TG: i am the definition of okay  
TG: you couldnt get any more okay than dave strider right now  
TG: i dont know whether to laugh loudly or bash my head against a wall  
TG: what happened?  
GT: to get me involved?  
TG: no to make you so goddamn dreamy  
TG: what do you think  
GT: i don’t really know? it just sort of… happened.  
GT: you should blame karkat, he was the one who got me into all of this!  
TG: karkat?  
TG: oh my god karkat is a troll name  
TG: youre talking to trolls  
TG: john what are you doing  
TG: youve changed  
TG: i dont even know you anymore  
GT: hehehe, well he’s sort of the reason i’ve been too busy to tell you about all this!  
TG: youre fucking him  
GT: what!! no!  
TG: that would be the cherry on top  
TG: the delicious grey cherry  
TG: that you are definitely fucking  
GT: dave it is not anything like that! we are seriously just friends.  
TG: youre gonna have to tell him that if youre planning on fucking him any longer  
GT: dave shut up!  
GT: god you are an ass sometimes  
TG: maybe i wouldnt be so much if you hadnt have dropped the biggest bombshell on the face of the earth on me  
TG: but lets let bygones be bygones  
TG: maybe this is what my dream was telling me about  
TG: like sort of symbolic  
TG: how both our lives are gonna be turned upside down or something  
GT: maybe? i don’t really know, i am just really excited for it  
TG: for what  
GT: so can you make it here for wednesday?  
TG: yeah probably itll be pushing it a bit but well be there  
GT: so you have a plan to get here?  
TG: sorta  
GT: what is it?  
TG: jade  
GT: …  
GT: that is it?  
TG: ye  
GT: how is that going to work?  
TG: because shes jade  
TG: and jade is weird and always knows the right place to be and the right place to go  
TG: even if theyre fully guarded we can probably sneak in a cargo convoy heading your way with her calling the shots  
TG: and even if her freaky ability fucks up shes never missed a shot in her life and im pretty much the master of swordplay  
TG: well be fine  
GT: hehehe, swordplay  
TG: oh hey there john some weird guy with some semblance of morals took over your account for a while but im glad to see youre back now  
GT: hahahahahahaha shut up  
TG: yeah okay  
TG: can i go now  
TG: i need to tell harley about this  
GT: totally! just one more thing  
GT: when you get here can you be at my city’s marketplace for about midday?  
TG: yeah probably  
TG: why  
GT: it’s a secret  
TG: oh yeah okay fine whatever that sounds cool  
GT: hehehe, it will just be a lot more fun if you don’t know  
TG: i swear to god if this is a prank  
GT: no! i promise.  
GT: i’m just really excited.  
GT: like i’m pretty sure that everything can really change with karkat.  
GT: everything is moving forward and it is really exciting and also really scary!  
GT: and i know i used to say that it didn’t need to change and that everything was fine or whatever, but it totally wasn’t and i was being a big fat dumb idiot.  
GT: but he really wants to make things better for you guys  
GT: and so do i, i guess.  
TG: so youre not looking back and thinking you should have stayed at home like a good little human boy  
TG: im almost proud of you  
TG: karkats the leader right  
GT: yeah! we’re gonna make things better, all of us!  
TG: yeah man  
TG: were doing this  
TG: were making this happen  
GT: hehehe. Okay well i have to go, night is coming and i need to sleep  
TG: cool  
GT: i’ll see you soon dave!  
GT: like actually see you!  
GT: that is so awesome.  
TG: go to bed you dork.  
TG: night is coming  
TG: you need to sleep


	10. Interlude - Sleeping

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I put the word "interlude" before the wrong chapter title because I'm an idiot but I've fixed it now.
> 
> In other news, have a double update.

Your room is like a cell.

No, not like a cell, it is a cell.  Beautiful, plush, swimming in luxury, but still a cell.  Not that you have any wish to leave.  A cell, for all its stagnation, is still preferable to a world you don’t know.

You have a palace to yourself, jewels in such a deep purple it could rival the night, yellows to make your eyes sting.  You have very little use for them, other than as shiny distractions, but they keep you from your thoughts, however fleetingly.  Around the gardens there are rosebushes that grow so high that even from your room in this tower, you can barely see over them.  You have almost everything.

And you are so, so lonely.

You are at your desk in the middle of your room, scrawling out stories to keep you from the tedium.  You like to lose yourself in fantasy worlds every so often, where everything is just so, where everything is right.  There’s no one who will disturb you in your seclusion, and you would like to keep it that way.

You hear the door rustle against carpet on soundless hinges.  Well, no one except her.

“Daughter dearest, I need your advice.”  A sing-song voice, mocking and cold.  You don’t look up from the page, but you stop writing almost immediately.  Her words are like ice against your ears.

You’re not really her daughter; she’s not really your mother. She calls you it to remind you how utterly _hers_ you are.  You were taken from your mother when you were very young, long enough ago that you have only the faintest memories to grip to, only the pervading smell at the back of your mind of something like nail varnish remover.  They are other distractions, things you want to cling to.  Those memories seem to surface at random, gripping you for the shortest time and fading until you’re unsure whether they even existed in the first place.  But this woman is not your mother.  She is your keeper.

You move your head slowly to the one window in your room, as if moving through syrup.  The dusk is falling like soot.  You feel distant.  It’s a feeling that’s become white noise to you. 

Without even needing to look behind you, you know how tall she is, how imposing, how damn regal.  And you know that the wisest course of action is always to respond exactly how she wants you to.

“Why of course, mother,” you say, voice flat and slightly croaky.  It’s been a while since you last used it.  You know what she wants.  She keeps you for your talents, she never visits for anything else. 

You can hear that terrible grin in her voice.   “There have been some goings on in one of the cities.  I need your advice,” she says again, keeping an ambivalent tone.  She wants you to know she doesn’t need you, you are only useful, not essential.  “You’ve probably seen on the news already.”

Yes, you had seen.  The tv was permanently set to the news channel.  It gave you a faraway window, a magic mirror to look through.  It had been so long since you’d been part of that world.  It all seemed so unreal, so staged.  There were the images of explosions, people crying, people screaming.  Trolls with bloodthirsty looks in their eyes.  You watched it all with disinterest.  You can already see where this is going.  There will be pain.  There will be blood.  The usual.  In all honesty, you don’t like thinking about it. 

But there is all the time in the world to think.

“I have,” you say, getting back to your writing.  You leave your statement there.

Your mother tuts.  You do your best to ignore the feeling of her eyes, boring into your back with a fierceness, a calamity that offsets your feigned stoicism.  You don’t want to help her really, she’s never proved anything but a violent nuisance.  But she always knows when you’re lying, and you would rather not get on her bad side. 

You’ve trained yourself to bare the unseen looks she gives you.  It’s still hard, though, even after all this time.  Sharp memories of claw like fingers, manic giggles, cutting pain and all the things you would rather forget keep coming back to you.  It’s the only thing that’s real, those memories.  And all your life you’ve been trained to respect her, never let her down.  When she kicks you, you thank her.  There are a hundred million people who’d do anything to be on the receiving end of her boot. 

You are, after all, her subject.  She is your saviour against trolls and mutants and all the abnormalities of nature.  You are her subject, and she condescends to lead you. 

She is waiting.  You carry on with your writing, as if she isn’t in the room.  You’re testing her patience.  Little victories.

“Well?” she snarls.  “It undermines all the stability my mother and her father and all my descendants have strived to keep for centuries!  Not just us, you as well.  You and I, together.”  She has glides towards you on ghost feet.  Her hand is on your shoulder.  She whispers in your ear, her accent slips. Mask gone, more terrifying.  “I ain’t about to let scum ruin it.   You’re gonna help me, girl.”

You force yourself to remain calm against her barrage and the cloying breath against your face.  Inwardly, you flinch. 

“So,” she says in something barely more than a whisper.  That stiff, mocking voice is back again, the barrier between her and the world.  “I think that we should take action.  Do you agree?”

You force yourself to smirk.  You stare into the encroaching dusk.  “Yes, by all means start a war.”  It’s a flippant answer; the words you’ve said could change the world.  In fact, you know they will, but it’s a world that you’ve been kept separate from for so long that even with this rather large fact staring you in the face, you can’t bring yourself to care.  The world is out there and you are in here.  You have all the same emotional investment in it as you would in a pineapple.

The Condesce smiles her toothy grin.  This is all she wanted.  There are no pleasantries wasted between you as she moves to leave. At the door she turns to speak, a terrible, taunting sound.  “You have been helpful as ever, daughter dearest.” The same voice she uses for the masses.  She blows you a kiss and leaves.  She stalks out of the room and then, only then, do you allow your body to curl in on itself and shiver. 

Your cat hesitantly emerges from under your bed and you allow him a small smile.  He quickly makes his way to your lap, mewling and stalking and making you his personal resting place.  You stroke his fur fondly and you think, even though you don’t want to.

Slowly, slowly, you move to the window and place your hand on its glass, even if just to let the cold chase away your thoughts.  The night is coming, and in the gardens the flowers that bear your name create an impenetrable wall between you and everything else.

Your name is Rose Lalonde, but most here call you the Seer of Light

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd like to point out that the ancestors will be characterised slightly differently than they appear in the comic, and I've been trying to characterise other characters slightly differently as well while maintaining the same recognisable essence they have in the comic.
> 
> But yeah, hope you're still enjoying this. I have been waiting so long to post this chapter.


	11. Blood

It’s Wednesday. The dawn had seen summer lift its hold slightly, with spitting rain falling for the first hour of sunlight, but by midday the heat had come back in full force. And here you stand, in your dilapidated hovel, being coddled by a giant purple-blooded freak and worrying yourself with imagined scenarios of the protest/meeting that takes place in a few hours. Images of blood and horror turn relentlessly like a million morning starlings in your mind, despite the fact that you know the worst that could happen is you'll be ignored or beaten, or the rain will come back and force everyone away. What are you fucking thinking. You don't know how to give a speech. You wish you weren't so nervous. You wish John were here. You wish, you wish, you wish.

“Hey,” Gamzee says, enveloping you in his arms and softly stroking your hair. “You ain’t got any reason to be all shaky like you are. You’ve been motherfuckin’ bitchtits at collectin’ all them friends out on the street ‘til today, ain’t so different talkin’ to them all as it is talking to them one at a time, is it?”

He’s sort of grabbed your head and forced your face into his chest, so that when you huff it only comes out as a muffled sort of yelp and you get a mouthful of cotton-polyester blend at the same time.

“Actually, Gamzee, it’s completely fucking different. Fuck me for ever thinking this was a good idea. Fuck you for going along with it. Fuck everyone for letting me do this. This is my last stand in the realms of moderate reputation. I'll be a fucking laughing stock. I'll be the guy who tried to do something and ended up shouting a string of expletives instead. They'll sing songs about me. 'The little troll that tried but ended up vomiting his own bile sack up instead.'”

With a last sickeningly loving squeeze he pushes you away, staring down at you with the capillaries of his eyes glowing indigo and the smile on his face serene. “Karbro,” he says. “If any motherfucker could change the unmirthful land he finds himself in, it’s gonna be you.”

And he means it. You can see it past the stoner image, at the core of him is a belief like steel, one that never erodes or fades or gets lost. But he's the one who found you, he's the one who's meant to believe in you. The problem is the hundred or so strangers that only know you through chance encounters. They're like shadows that come from no particular source.

You push back the anxiety. You meet Gamzee's eyes.

“That made no sense whatsoever you dribbling sack of stained underwear." And then, begrudgingly, "thanks.”

He lilts his chuckle, the one caught between light and dark, and smiles at nothing in particular. His eyes are unfocused but his hand comes up to lightly brush your head, and he leans his forest of dark hair towards you to rest his forehead on yours. “It's what I'm here for, brother.”

For a moment you allow yourself to lean into him before scoffing and pushing off. Without his pressure and the comfort it offered, you're back to wringing your hands into odd shapes again. But you'd rather fall back into dread than rest too long and never get up.

The smaller the amount of time, the longer it is. A day can pass and the second hand has barely made it round the clock. You wish John were here.

“I wish John were here,” you say.

It's unconscious, you barely register it passing through your lips with all the other meaningless and not-so-meaningless things you've been muttering under your breath all day. It's only Gamzee's laugh, and the knowing tilt to his head that makes the blood collect in your face and ears as if it were on a mission to get as far away from your feet as possible.

“You like that motherfucker.”

For a second you pause, unsure how to respond.

“I do _not_ like him!”  Good.  Nailed it.  Very adult.

“haha, yeah you do, Karbro.”

“Shut up.”

“Whatever, brother, just wonderin' about the way you look at him and all.” He raises his hands in an almost shrug, “you like him, I like him. All there is to what I'm tryin' to all up and say.”

Your blush grows. “Well gee whizz thank godly fuck, at least I have your blessing for the entirely imagined relationship you think I want to start.”

“I ain't the one imaginin' it, brother.”

“Shut up!”

He smiles.

“Stop smiling.”

He carries on smiling.

You don't bother to try and make him stop, any attempt will just get him to smile more and you don't really need to feel like an ineffective child on top of all the shit you have to deal with today. So you lapse into silence, heavy with thought and anticipation, your feelings and his like the dawn dewdrops on leaves that collect and fall and spill and dry.

“I knew you was gonna do something great like this when I saw you.”

You look to him. He's distant, distracted, smiling. You don't say a word.

“Not like me. I grew up all skewed, started with bad people and carried on with bad people and ended up doin' some bad stuff. You could see that was gonna be me even when I was only young enough to chew on cardboard, right? And I still do bad stuff, I ain't got a head on me anymore, if ever I had a motherfuckin' head to begin with.” For a second he looks at you, straight in the eyes and there's something unknowable in him staring out at you, a green man in a purple suit. But then he looks away, through the cracks in the old wooden door, and starts again.

“But you got that look, like the whole world is bein' your friend and enemy all at the same time. Like when I found you, you looked like you ain't got no proper place or nowhere or noone to call your own or anythin'. You looked like you was about to give up, but you still wanted to fight. I dunno man, me? I'm a big old screw up from beginning to end. And I've been all up and thinkin', especially in these most recent, downright motherfuckin' magical times, that the best thing I ever gone and did was find you, and find Tavros, and give you a place to stay so you could both do all the great things you was always gonna do.” He closes his eyes sleepily and for once you don't see Gamzee, you see someone tired, but happy. Someone old and young and small and big and everything all at once. “I think the best thing I ever gone and did was give you me, and I know I ain't much, but seeing you smile makes it worth it.”

You're silent as you soak in what he says. And eventually, you move to him and hug him, soft and warm, with all the feelings in your chest fuzzy and right. And you smile into his ridiculous hair, and you mumble the only thing you can think to say.

“You're not a screw up; you're my brother.”

 

* * *

 

The sound, the noise, the music, all of it's raucous and chafing on your ears. The sheer freedom of sounds moving with the people who make them, weaving their way in between men and women and children and trolls and lives, so that for all the noise and for all the inability to pick at any of the strands of conversation long enough to make sense of them, you're happy.

You're excited; a little too excited. From inside you your gut makes a terrible knot of itself and the whole fucking thing looks like a debacle waiting to happen. No one is staring right now, that's the reason you used to come here so often, because everyone is too busy with their lives and their smiles to care, but it's only a matter of time before you take your place. You are desperately trying to hold back vomit.

Every so often you raise on tip-toes to try and see over the heads of the wandering bodies around you. And as non-chalant as you're trying to make it seem, even you can tell that it'd be clear to anyone you're looking for someone. You can't find him though, that mop of black hair or the glasses covering up noonday eyes or the stupid, frustrating, moronic buckteeth. It's all lost in between the crowd.

Standing next to you, Gamzee gives a cursory look around to help you look. By his side is Tavros, clutching Gamzee's hand discreetly and looking squarely at the ground. He had been asleep until only an hour or so ago, up all night worrying about today, and he wasn't even the one who was supposed to _talk_ to these people. But it seemed unfair to wake him, and Gamzee loved to watch him rest, or even know that he was resting, when the worried little lines on his forehead smoothed out.

The marketplace still scared Tavros, crowds of people standing very close by tend to do that to him. Understandable. A bit fucking pathetic, but understandable.

No, fuck, you have to stop being such a douche. Don't look for John. Look for the guy that has shorter hair than John, and the girl who has glasses like John's, if they're around. John said they might be around, so it might be good to look for them if John said that. To be honest, though, John didn't really describe much else about his friends. John just said they'd probably know you if they saw you.

You smack the side of your head and try to stop thinking about John.

You don't succeed.

“You smell preoccupied,” a voice at your shoulder says. You whip around to stare at Terezi, that ear to ear grin splitting her face. You mood sours from its already sour starting point. It's amazing that your mood could even sour anymore. By now it's not really much more than off milk.

“How do you even fucking smell a thing like that,” you ask, with a tone perhaps a little more snide than it should be.

She raps your legs with her stick. “Because it's obvious!”

“Yeah, well, you'd be preoccupied too if you were me.”

All she does is giggle and beckon to you. “Come on, Vriska's already clearing a space for us!”

Rubbing at your battered shin, you tug Gamzee and Tavros to follow Terezi, even though your entire body wants to run in the opposite direction. And of course, of course Vriska's chosen a space right in the centre, right between two kiosks crowded with people. Of course Terezi's ornated the box that's to act as your little podium with images of dragons. Of course you wouldn't be allowed to have even a modicum of self-respect standing up there. Of course.

You want to turn away and run forever.

But you don't.

Because this is important.

People are staring now. It's hard not to, five trolls in the middle of a crowded marketplace is an odd sight to anyone. But no one's thrown any insults or shoes at you yet. Maybe this could happen. This could happen.

There's one guy who won't stop staring though. He stands stock still, hands in pockets, back straight and legs apart, and huge, awful shades on his face. It's like he's simultaneously the most ridiculous parody and the most adoring homage to every spy in every movie that's ever been made. And as soon as you make eye contact, he nudges the person next to him and points straight at you, a tiny smirk on his smug face. You feel like he was literally waiting for you to look in order to point.

You decide this person is a dick and that you will waste no more time on him.

Of course, of course, of course, the moment you decide this is the exact moment both him and his companion make their way to you.

“Fucks sake.” You jerk your head in the direction of the newcomers. “douchepatrol is coming for us.”

“Doesn't that imply that you're the douche's and we're the guys trying to get you clean? Figuratively, of course.”

His voice is directly over your shoulder and you reel back into his chest in shock.

“This is flattering, but I'm not that type of gal.”

You're about to unleash an angry retort which you will undoubtedly regret when his friend comes running up and hits him on the shoulder.

“Dave!” she says, puffing slightly, eyebrows knitted together underneath a hood like night. “Don't do that weird runny thing when I'm not looking! And don't be such a fuckass, you barely even know theses guys!”

“I'm not being a fuckass, I'm endearing myself. And for the record, it's called flashstepping. Not that you would know.”

She (it's definitely a she, close by the hood doesn't obscure her features so much) hits him on the shoulder again. “You're being a fuckass because you're always a fuckass. And for the record, I don't care! Just don't do it when I'm not looking!”

“Fine, Goddamn, woman.”

Terezi coughs.

“I hate to interrupt but if you would be so kind as to please tell us what you are doing here and who the fuck you are, it would be greatly appreciated.”

“Oh!” The girl slaps her forehead and grins like she forgot her fucking keys in the car or something. “I'm Jade, this is Dave. We're friends of John, he probably said something about us.”

Vriska claps her hand and squeals in delight. “Oh, the pale mutts! This is perfect, you have to tell me how someone as square as Egbutt managed to meet you two.”

You can feel the knot in your stomach get tighter and tighter, and the box you want to stand on getting further and further away the more you look at it. This whole conversation, this whole place, seems so inane, so ridiculous, and for some reason you either want to get this whole stupid thing over with or just go home and sleep for the rest of your life.

“Right, yeah, shall we break out the tea and biscuits while we introduce ourselves?” you spit with more venom than you intended, but fuck it, you can feel a roll coming on and you need something to release your frustrations. “Or maybe we can all play some team games to get to know each other better. This right here is a perfect fucking time for team building, because God, I don't really have anything better to do that I can think of. In fact, fuck it, let's all just go back to mine and get drunk on the refreshingly nutty overtones that radiate from the wine of friendship.”

For a second no one says anything, a sort of bubble of silence in the midst of noise that exists only until Dave breaks it with a single, monotone “wow.”

Terezi tuts. “Don't mind him, he's just an idiot.”

Dave smiles. “I wasn't planning to.”

The silly cackle she gives in response is enough to get your eyes rolling and your feet moving. It's all that it takes to push you onto the platform, so that you're head and shoulders above the rest of the throng and looking down on all the heads and colours of blood and hair and skin that the city has to offer. More trolls are here than usual, and more people in huge hoods like Jade wears, and for a second you feel like you might have an actual audience, actual listeners, an actual message.

“So, what's your name again?” Terezi asks, and fuck, is that a flirtatious tone she's using? Is she flirting with that white haired bag of dicks? And for a second it distracts you, until you realise you've forgotten all your notes and everything you wanted to say.

So looking down at heads, and here or there one or two faces, you take a deep breath, and then another, to try and calm yourself down. You see Tavros and Gamzee staring mildly up at you, and Vriska with a manic glint in her eye. You see faces you've seen on the street infused with something close to hope that cracks their features like they've not used those muscles in a long time. And you try to find black hair, glasses, a tall noonday boy, a beaming smile.

He's not in your line of sight. But he's there, you know he is, he must be. And that's the thought that makes you sigh, bring your head up, cram your terror down to where it can't hurt you, and speak.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry I made you wait so long
> 
> Long story short, I started University and have been concentrating on that.
> 
> I will probably revise this chapter later.


	12. Nothing

“Dad, quick! We're going to be too far back to see him!”

Dad shakes his head and tries to keep up with you as you bounce like a child, on your way through the marketplace. It's Wednesday, and the day is almost at that moment of perfect balance, where the sun has an equal stretch of sky to traverse as it's already travelled, before the dusk leaks into sight like an ink-blot in water. 

Everything is loud. All the stalls have everything you could ever need. Plants bend and sway towards you from the brightly coloured counters of a kiosk. Starlings twist high in the air and pigeons land unceremoniously on striped canvas stall covers. People shout. You catch snippets of conversation as you search for Karkat. A month ago they'd have fascinated you. Now you just need to see that grey-tinted face and that puppy-dog scowl.

“Dad! Come ooonn!”

“I'm sure we'll be able to see your friend if we're at the front or the back, son.”

He looks reserved and worried, but you can't really blame him. You'd mentioned a friend you were going to see whenever he asked you where you were going in the past month, but you'd never mentioned his name. Or that he had grey skin and wasn't exactly human. Not until this morning, that is.

It was difficult to broach the subject really. You kept hoping it would just... come up. 'Son, I'm so glad that you're not secretly meeting with trolls and plotting a protest movement against the established regime in your spare time. I am so proud of you.' But he didn't really say anything like that. He talked about how school started soon, and how it was getting a lot hotter. How nice it was to have you there, how good it is to have your whole world stable and planned out for you. In the end you had to sit him down and blurt it out and it was just awful. He was like a piece of paper, dad. He crumpled.

It was like Dad and Karkat were playing tug of war in your head. You couldn't bare to see the man who raised you look so dejected and weak. It made you guilty. It made you scared. Someone you relied on for so long, looking like he could have been blown to bits by a breath of air. But pulling you to the other side was the promise of something new, something better, someone who cared, someone beautiful. It was never your intention to choose, though. You wanted them to reconcile, you wanted them to coexist. That was the thought that kept you in the living room, standing between your dads chair and the door, slowly telling him how sorry you were for lying to him but not for doing what you were doing. It wasn't eloquent, to be honest you kind of sounded like a butt on legs trying to fart out those excuses, but it was the truth of things, the thinking, feeling heart of things.

As you talked, he listened. That's the type of man he is. And when some glint of understanding flashed in his eye and he buried his face in his hands you felt even more guilty. But he took a deep breath and nodded, probably more for himself than for you, you think, and turned to look you in the eye. It was so scary, like the scariest thing you've ever ever had to do. Because what if he didn't love you anymore? Yeah, that's a dumb thing to think and you realise that now, but what if he told you to leave? Never come back? Told you that this was the final straw, and threw you out of the mirrored paradise of your street instead of allowing you to waddle out on your own. That wasn't something you could cope with. It still isn't. It won't ever be, you think.

But he didn't. He just sort of blustered out a sigh and nodded. Not with that usual dadly smile, though, so you were still uptight, scared. There was silence, like at the edge of a cliff, staring down and there's wind blowing around you and in your ears and messing up your hair, but it's still silent.

“Okay,” he said. A pause. “I can't say I approve, John. Think of the danger.”

“But Dad, there's no danger! They're just like people! They are people, really.” You tried to grin at him then, but your mouth seemed like it was made of felt so it probably came out all funky looking and weird. You think your dad got the message, though. Like 'hey, I'm okay, look, nothing happened all that time I was sneaking out behind your back!'

“John, I understand that they're people, but they can be vicious. There's a reason they don't integrate with us, son. You have to -”

“Dad, stop!” Rubbing your head in frustration you sighed and looked up. There was only the ceiling to see, that barrier between the here and the sky. Then you looked at him. Worry lines across all his face, older than you'd ever seen him and every second, every word seemed to make him older. Something broke in you just then, when you realised he would get old. But you charged through your speech anyway, because despite the deep feeling of pity and terror you felt, there was anger there too.

“You don't get it. Honestly, the TV and the news and all of that don't even come close to what life is like for them! I'm a grown-up now, I can take care of myself, and they're just trying to live, dad. Like, they don't get anything, this place would be heaven for them. When you step outside the box you see more things, right? And yeah, that's sort of another thing I want to talk about.” You took a deep breath. “Okay, so I've been helping out with this thing that they're planning. No, nothing dangerous, not like that! I haven't even been helping that much, just making signs and asking people to come along. I've just been watching, really. They were the ones doing all the work and stuff. But... Okay, I know I've been really, really dumb not telling you anything before now, but I'm telling you about this and it would be so amazing if you could come. Oh man, I can't explain anything. Basically, there's this sort of meeting thing, like a protest, a _peaceful_ one happening in the marketplace tomorrow, and if you could come and see what Karkat says for yourself... well that would be great. It would be stepping outside the box for you. Like I've done. Sort of.”

“Karkat is the troll boy you know?”

“Yeah, that's him.”

Neither of you said anything for a little after that; it was a silence that stretched for days. As you waited for his answer you glanced at the mirror hanging above the mantle piece and watched the reflection of the sunlight leaking onto the carpet.

“Okay,” he said. 

“Okay? Okay what?”

“Okay. I mean okay I'll come.”  
  
“Okay!”

You were practically jumping then, you were so excited. And you're practically jumping now you'reso nervous. Getting closer, you can see a crowd has gathered and you used your height to loom over the other people clustered like penguins and whispering. You'd heard his voice start a while ago, it was the type that carried, but you can barely hear what he was saying over the collected murmurings of the crowd.

Until, that is, Karkat points almost directly at you and shouts for “the fuckers in the back to stop their yammering.”

You purposefully stare as hard as you can at Karkat then, as much to hear what he's talking about as to avoid the disapproving glance your dad directs your way at the language. Alll you can really see is the mess of jet hair with those two strange lumps that cover tiny horns. He's got that grumpy look on his face, but it's as fragile as you've ever seen it, like you could touch him and it would shatter and all the terror bubbling beneath the surface would rise and flow like a deluge through the crowd. And all you can think of, all you want to do, is touch him, be near him, hold him until he gets back to normal. The whole damn plan can go to hell, just as long as you can spend a second stroking his hair. Making him comfortable.

You gulp and push those thoughts aside. Not so much because they make you feel weird (even though they do) as much as because you want everything to work out and everything to change. He must be standing on a box or something, he almost looks average height. He's not saying anything.

“Speak,” you mutter.

Karkat coughs. He opens his mouth, closes it, and coughs again. People are beginning to murmur again around you, a sound like bees close by your ear. “Speak, Karkat.”

“Okay,” he says, finally. “Okay. Um, first, I guess hi. I've already introduced myself and these guys, so, you know, Like I said, I'm Kar- I TOLD YOU TO HOLD YOUR YAMMERING TRAPS I SWEAR TO THE ALMIGHTY GOD IF YOU DON'T SHUT UP I WILL GO BACK THERE AND SEW YOUR LIPS TOGETHER. I'M TRYING TO SAY SOMETHING IMPORTANT HERE.”

Some people laugh, some leave. You cradle your face in your palms and groan.

“Okay. Okay, I'm sorry, that was stupid. I'm honestly all bark and no bite. Not that I'm a dog or anything, I'm a person. Which is why I'm here I guess. Yeah, so I'm sorry, I shouldn't have shouted. Goddamn I'm so fucking bad at this. I had notes but I left them at home. Not really a home. Well it is, but it's not a house. It's a shack. Fuck me.

“Listen, unless I'm making a pisspoor excuse at trying to frighten or insult someone I am not good with words. And the thing is, I'm always trying to frighten or insult someone. That's how I make my way through the day. Most of you won't even know the feeling when you get to a point so low that all you can do is try and bring everything else around you to the same level, but that's what it's like all the time for us. People like me. People. Try to imagine living life like an endless pariah, where no one touches or acknowledges you unless it's to hurt you or maim you or do something to make everything that much worse. Every single time I have to go through a human street, that's what I get. Every time I bleed, that's what I get. And I bleed a lot. Because of people like you. People with normal blood and normal skin colours and normal teeth. And what the fuck, as long as I'm trying to make a new start I might as well start with myself and tell you something I've never told anyone before. Look at me leaning in theatrically like the fucking thespian I am. I am always scared. I am always scared.”

Karkat makes eye contact with every stranger he can find, but he's avoiding people he knows. You've never heard him say anything like this. You've never bothered to ask. Your dad is looking at him with deep concentration. He's always been emotional. There are tears in his eyes. There might even be some in yours.

But before he can take another breath some vase or bauble from one of the stalls is thrown towards his stage. It moves in slow motion, and it takes you a few seconds before you realise that's not just your imagination. Halfway through its arc someone had caught it in their psionics, slowing it down until it rested it midair. And then they set it gently on the ground. No one says a word. People shuffle. And then everyone explodes with whispering. Karkat looks around for a second with wide, angry eyes, before he gathers himself together and raises his voice.

“I'm not scared for myself, look at me, I'm a fucking train wreck and I know it. I'm scared because I don't know whether the person who found me and made me what I am is going to come home tonight. I'm scared because the goodbye I said the other day to my friend might just be the last one. What would you do, if the only times you ever realised you'd slept were the times you woke up? And then you had to blame yourself for sleeping and check the other room to make sure they're okay? And I know that I don't even have to ask some of you, the ones with hoods, the ones looking at the ground instead of me. You know what, anyone who doesn't know, just ask them. Ask a troll. Be a person, instead of a human being.”

Someone bumps into your dad, average in every way except for her grey-toned skin and yellow nails. Quickly she steps back, out of reaching distance, you notice, and eyes him warily, muttering a hurried apology.

“That's perfectly fine,” he says with a smile.

Her eyebrows shoot up, but she smiles right back and nods respectfully. Then she mingles back into the formless mass of the crowd. You look up to him. “I'm proud of you, dad.” Ridiculously cheesy and you know it, but Dad's smile is genuine and the sentiment behind the words is as real as it comes.

Dad looks... different. Not as old anymore. He just looks hesitant, and proud, and _hopeful._ It's such a strange look on his face, something you can't believe you've never missed the absence of before, but there's real hope there that makes him look thirty years younger.

Past his face, past that look, you can see one troll behind a kiosk with an odd look about him. Shifty. He looks like he might be giggling. Karkat's speech has become a drone in the background and you realise you should be paying attention, so you tear your eyes off the troll and look back to the boy with the bright red blood. These types of things are bound to attract some weirdos, at least it's no one who looks threatening.

“What I'm trying to say here, what I could have said in four words instead of four fucking thousand, is that things are awful and everything is wrong. We're people, we may not be humans but we're goddamn people, and we need the same chances to be people that everyone else gets. The point is that things. Need. To -”

A flash of white. The earth shatters. An erupting sound.

Nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> haha woops i accidentally took three months to update and this chapter is still rough as hell. I'm sorry guys, but I've had other stuff to worry about recently and this has been pushed to the side a little. I'll try and be faster for the next update :)


	13. That Corpse you Planted

This is all there is. This ringing silence, the feeling of something pressed on every piece of body. Crushed to stone dust. Heavy weight, squeezed by gravity. It is so difficult to breathe.

The silence slowly gives way to high pitched wailing and the ghosts of screams. Something is weighing down on you. You are on the ground, maybe. Everything hurts. It is all so wrong. Maybe you should open your eyes, John.

But they are glued shut and you can't breathe because something is weighing down on you. Someone is shouting. Lots of people are shouting. There's so much noise and what bliss, what bliss it would be to sleep.

But how can you sleep when you can't even breathe. You have to breathe. Why can't you breathe? You have to open your eyes. Something is pressing down on you.

The sky is grey. Sunlight choked out by dust, the whole atmosphere a mirror of the ground. Your ears are still filled by that tinnitus screaming. Shapes and silhouettes move like homeless spectres through your field of vision. Such an unreal city. One stumbles and falls face first to the floor.

Something is pressing down on you. It has to be moved. You can't breathe with it there.

Maybe now there's the hint of pain across your face, the hint of something sticky in your eyelashes. The world is slowly coming into focus. You can see the empty, burned frames of market stalls rising like mute grey guardians into the sky. A shattered mirror standing alone on the shell of one kiosk. Everything is blurred. Where are your glasses? There is something pressing down on you.

So you push at it, a dead weight, and try to sit up. You are coughing, your arm burns and burns. The weight shifts and your lungs expand slightly more. Now you can see.

The whole world has become a wasteland. There is rubble, people are screaming, people are searching, walking, drifting, trying to find a piece of someone they love in the debris. A woman is on her knees and staring at someone on the ground. A man is howling. What pain are they in? You still can't breathe. A girl is stumbling and trying to find her way out, trying to find a way through the dust, and her blood falls grey in time with her pulse, and she's dying. She's dying. And all around you are bits and pieces of the dead, all the same grey colour, pierced or decapitated or falling apart. You are in a graveyard of dreams, and it doesn't even register. You need to get this weight off of you.

You push at it. It's a man. A man with a white shirt stained grey and red, collapsed over your stomach and facing the ground. He has a plank of wood coming out of his back. He has grey hair. You rock him. Noises are trying to come from your mouth, your tongue is trying to work itself, but it doesn't sound like anything. You're trying to form a word, something rational in your brain that has decided to stick around is telling you that. You're trying to ask the body something. You hadn't even realised. You had been trying to say it so long.

“Dad?” it comes out broken and high. “Dad?”

You rock him. You stroke his hair. You try and move him so you can see his face. There's blood on his eyebrows. His hair is matted. His eyes are open.

“Dad?” His hands are cold. “Dad?” He is so limp. “Dad?” And you can't stop saying it. “Dad?” Not until he answers. “Dad?” Not until he says something.

“Dad?"

Please.

“Dad?”

Just once more.

“Dad.”

No more smiles. No more summers. No more 'I'm proud of you'. No more 'I'm disappointed in you'. No more soft voice. No more sighs.

“Dad.”

No more. Nothing more.

You are not crying. You can't. He has to answer first, and then you can cry. But now you're just broken. Now you are empty. You're the same burned wreckage as the wasteland around you. You're the same empty.

“John? Oh Christ, John. John, listen, can you hear me?”

For one second you clutch so hard like he said the words until you realise it can't be. It won't ever be.

“John, look at me. Oh god, John. John, it's Dave, it's me, Dave. John, I have to take you now. John, please look at me.”

His glasses are gone. Like yours. Only his were sunglasses. Dave's eyes are red, you remember. He's got a cut on his neck. You clutch to your dad.

“John, I'm going to lift you up now, okay? You're safe now, John. I'm going to grab your arms now, John. You're safe.”

You squeal. A sound like a child throwing a tantrum, and you hold onto your dad that little bit more. “No! Dad.”

He's grabbed you by your armpits, pulling you away, and there's a horrible, searing pain down your side and up your arm. You scream. The whole world splits in two.

The last thing you see before you black out are your dad, alone on the messed up concrete, a small figure in the dust and and a mess of jet hair that swims into your vision. The entire world falls apart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter and the next are very short, and then we come to the end of this story with the final chapter


	14. Alone, Among

Before everything became nothing, you saw him for a second. Standing there next to a man in a white shirt, positively fucking beaming at you. Just for a second, that silhouette became the focal point for everything, it was your John and he was there for you.

Before, Gamzee, Tavros, Vriska, Terezi, Jade, the Douche, they had all been looking up at you, paying attention, and so had everyone else. This was your stage, and you could see the whole world.

And then the sky roared, fire flared, and you fell to the ground.

* * *

 

A construction site in your head a relentless pounding ache high pitched ringing every shape and line fuzzy and immaterial like it isn't just you but the earth that is bleeding people from near the front rows they all run and scream and trample each other trying to escape with lives still intact and you can feel arms pulling you up pulling you through the water they're holding onto you they won't let you go a thousand thousand arms and blue bodies or is it blood holding you safe holding each other safe and you know that something has erupted some volcano has turned the landscape to ashes because if that weren't so then why are you here why are you bound between the arms of the all your loves. All but John. You can't feel his arms can't see his face don't know where he is but he has to be somewhere because if he's not here if he's not somewhere then what can you possibly do anymore John has to be safe, you have to find John. You have to hold him. You have to feel his breath. You have to make sure your world won't be left in perpetual dusk. 

Breathe.

You're bleeding.

It's such an odd time to realise you're in love.

It must have happened near the back, near where he was. Is. Oh god please be safe please let him be smiling like he always is let him still be the same as he was. You're not sure if it's blood or tears or both running down your cheeks. You struggle against the arms. Your clothes are covered in all different colours like a mock rainbow. Vriska is clutching your shoulder. She's on the floor with you.

Some splinter or piece of shrapnel has embedded itself in her arm, pointing accusingly at you. Cobalt blood oozes like slurry from the wound and drips steadily to the floor. Her grip oscillates between a vice and a leaf. She turns to look at you, her face bloody and twisted and gasping. There's a gash across her left eye that's turned everything to nothing. You vomit.

For a little everything becomes washed out and all you can concentrate on is not fainting. The screams become white noise, red noise, blue noise. When you're finally able to look up, nothing is right.

Everyone near the pedestal is clutching each other in some way. Jade and Dave are on the floor on top of each other, almost unhurt. It looks like she might have even pulled him to the ground just before the blast. Terezi is holding onto Vriska, tears running down her face in a constant stream, sitting with her leg at an odd angle and telling her to stay calm, stay fucking calm, stay okay. No jackknife grin. Tavros is trying to stem an ocean of bronze from his temple and a river of purple from Gamzee's face. All their hands grip. All your blood is mixing on the ground.

Screaming, the falling sound of structures, amid all that Dave stands and takes off his cracked glasses, gives them to Jade. He says something to her and his eyes are so wide and so scared and he's looking at everything like it's a familiar terror. Jade goes pale, her ears flatten, her hands go up to her mouth. They stand alone among this group of broken bodies for so long, and if they say anything it's lost in the wailing of your ears.

Dave shouts something that sounds like he's underwater. A single syllable, and moves into the dust, the dying crowd. Jade is staring with such wide green eyes, on her knees, watching everyone and not knowing what to do. You become aware that you have a body, that it can move. That single syllable echoes and moves like starlings in your head. John.

You detach yourself from Vriska. She gasps. You stumble away after Dave, limping, ignoring the stinging that blossoms from your face. Your legs won't be talked into walking in a straight line, but you have to move, follow, find him. God, please be okay. Please, please. Just once more see that smile, those noonday eyes. You're crying. You want to hold him and never let go, keep him safe, but it's so much more than you deserve.

Walking for hours. Maybe minutes. It's difficult to tell. Trying to meander your way through the bits and pieces of what once were people. Trying to ignore the broken cries of everyone asking for help. One girl falls in front of you, grabs your ankle and dies. You can't see for the dust. You won't stop crying.

There's a scream near to you of a timbre you know. Immediately, you whip round, you run, you find Dave clutching him as he reaches for something on the floor. You hear his shout cut out and his body go limp and feel everything inside you disappear in an instant. Dave sees you, his eyes bright red and wide. “Help me.”

You stumble to John, grab his torso, ignore Dave telling you to bring him back to the front. Just for this moment, you want to be with him, make sure you can feel his chest rising and falling no matter how ragged it is. You want it all to end. You want everything to end and just to keep this boy in your arms for however long the rest of time is. You want, you want, you want, you want.

“John.” Your voice is tiny. “John, please wake up.” Dave is telling you to grab his legs so you do. Autopilot. “John, please.” You can't hear yourself, not well. You feel yourself speaking. “You're so brilliant and so wonderful and so beautiful. You're the only light I've ever found anywhere. Please don't go out. I don't know what will happen.”

Exhausted, picking your way through the screaming dead, you make your way back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> woah man three chapters in three days. admittedly they're quite short so i don't know how much they'll satiate you after months of activity, but at least they're out there (even if i'm not very happy with a lot of it).
> 
> the last chapter is gonna take some time. I'm debating whether to write part two at all, considering Homestuck is ending soon and the next part is going to take a lot of time to plan and write. Does anyone have any opinions?


	15. Parts

The world appears in dark grey. Sleep had been dreamless, if you had slept. You remember nothing of sleep. But now, just before you open your eyes, you can see grey faces and black, wailing maws.

The sun bears its head and peeks through holes in the walls. Makeshift curtains play mildly in an empty breeze. Against your back is something soft and, beneath it, the hint of something much harder. There’s a distinctly uncomfortable feeling that travels through your body, radiating from your arm as it rests on your stomach. You roll over, bang the elbow of that arm, and the feeling becomes sharper, more intense. When you realise it’s pain, you realise everything else as well.

For a good while you lay and stare at the ceiling, imagining clouds above it and above them, nothing. Nothing exists. You want to close your eyes and let sleep come, but this is a world where you can’t envision sleep, only endless waves of tomorrows. It feels like a dream. Not just the marketplace, everything. Your body feels dreamlike, anchored to the real world only through the aches that move like starlings through your limbs. You don’t want to believe. What is there to believe.

You look to your left and see the fuzzy outline of your glasses on the floor next to you. You don’t know why it takes so long to summon up the motivation to reach over with your good arm and put them on your face. The world seems softer without the defined lines of perfect vision. It seems nicer.

But you reach over anyway. Nothing can really stop routine, and this is just another morning. Or, at least, you think it’s morning. It’s an awkward fumble to get them on without hitting any of your sore spots on the hard dirt floor. You have to sit up, and even that takes a lot of effort. Not so much because you can’t do it as because you’re tired. Tired in your bones, not in your muscles. Tired in the way that it’s a part of you, not a description.

With the room in focus, the world becomes more real. Next to you is a tiny grey table with three beaten books on top of it, and nothing much else. There’s no real door. Karkat’s room. This is Karkat’s room. You remember it from your visits, when you had come to change the world and hadn’t realised what you were asking for. Which means this must be Karkat’s house. Which means that Karkat must be here somewhere.

You don’t know how to feel about that. Part of you wants him here to hold, and another wants to sit still for an eternity, to find a way to stop thinking. Part of you wants to hold him. It’s not strange to you anymore, nothing is. It’s odd, then, that you don’t call his name.

You arm is set in a makeshift sling. Your hands are still dirty. It can’t have been long since the marketplace. Images come and are quickly suppressed. You want to cry but you can’t. You are so, so tired. All you can do is listen.

There are the sounds of outside, the wind giggling through the flimsy curtain and the sporadic voices of people going past, but the world is oddly hushed. It’s like white noise, static, like you haven’t tuned in to quite the right wavelength. The sounds of the day seem to bleed into you; the world carries on. They shake some of that deep seated lethargy from your bones.

You realise that real white noise is echoing from somewhere as well. From the room opposite comes the sound of a tinny voice and then a burst of static, over and over again. For a few minutes you sit and listen to it, wondering what it is, whether you should investigate, before eventually you lift yourself from the cobbled together bed and stand. You blink twice, somewhere deep inside hoping that perhaps it will stop and you won’t need to move to a place where others might be, but you know it won’t.

You’re not really curious. In fact, you don’t even know if you care. It’s just the done thing, to check what’s going on, and routine still pulls you forward into that room. So with stumbling steps you pass the grey walls and walk into the living room.

The first thing you notice is Karkat. Of course it is. It always is. He sits there and his head is angled down at a radio between his legs, so you can see the golden tips of his tiny horns. You very nearly smile. Dave and Jade sit next to him on the mattress, Jade gripping onto Dave’s hand and Dave with a downward slope to his thin lips. Both are pale. It’s odd to see them in real life, you think. Odd to see them moving, despite cuts to their skin. Odd to see how easy it is to tear a human. Odd to think how fragile you are.

Tavros sits with his face in his hands. He is shirtless, and you see scars crossed with new formed cuts all over his body. They’re all so quiet. They all look so horrified. The radio carries on its message.

Karkat looks up. “John!” He drowns out the voice that blares from the radio.

In his haste to reach you he trips over it, falls to the floor, swears, launches himself back up and takes two strides towards you. It looks like he’s about to touch you before he remembers that you may not be up to any physical contact. So instead he sort of reaches over and pats your head. The idiot actually pats your head.

It makes you want to laugh. Not just laugh, guffaw, fall to the ground in hysterics. You can’t explain it, it’s just hilarious, and you know it’s stupid but you laugh anyway, and once one giggle escapes all the rest come. You laugh so hard you cry, and everyone is looking at you weird, but for once you really don’t care. Karkat wraps his arms around you, and you lean into them and carry on laughing. You push your face into his neck to muffle yourself. You know for a fact that he’s probably looking over at the others like the scared puppy he really is because he won’t know what the fuck to do, and that just makes you laugh harder. It’s ridiculous, you need to stop, and your brain is frantically telling your mouth to shut up. It takes a while before your body listens to it, though, and there are still tears in your eyes, and you feel emptier than before. You hiccough once or twice, and let silence fall back.

“What in God’s name was that?” Karkat asks.

You giggle and Karkat cringes, which makes you want to giggle again, but you manage to suppress it this time.

“You’re just funny, Karkat,” you say. Broken voice.

“Yeah, I’m fucking hilarious. Come on.” He pulls you to the mattress and makes you sit next to him, squeezing you between himself and Tavros in a position that is only slightly more comfortable than being on fire. Thankfully, Tavros stands and lets you spread out. He looks for a moment like he might sit on the floor, but something in the room next to Karkat’s catches his eye and he begins to bustle off.

At the door he turns to you with his sweet worried eyes. “I’m sorry, John. I am glad you’re awake now, though.” Then he leaves.

There’s a weight in the room now that it’s been acknowledged. So you think of a way to change the topic.

“What was that on the radio?”

Rather than lift the weight seems to double, and you wonder what was so bad about your inquiry as to make everyone around you suddenly seem like someone else had just died. For answer, Karkat picks up the radio, turns the speaker to you, and waits.

The blare of static lasts a couple of seconds before that tinny voice appears again, but this time you’re listening to the words. The voice is smooth, almost calming, and with each second that passes it makes you feel more and more like you’re sinking into the floor.

“The Condesce has stated that these acts of terrorism will not be tolerated. The terrorist trolls are to be dealt with mercilessy. Their names are: Karkat Vantas, Vriska Serket, Tavros Nitram, Terezi Pyrope and Gamzee Makara, believed to be residing in the east.” A short description of each of them followed. “The public is asked not to approach these trolls, and to turn in any information that may lead to their capture. These trolls are not to be approached, they are assumed dangerous and at least one is confirmed as mutant. Community, Identity, Stability...”

The static came back and lasted a few seconds before the message repeated itself. You reach over to turn it off.

The silence is aching.

“What’s going on?” You ask.

Dave coughs. “They think we’re terrorists. Or, well, they think _you_ are,” he points to Karkat. “They think we lured everyone to the marketplace just to blow them -”

“No.” Jade interrupts, her forehead is creased, her eyes are wide, her ears lay flat against her head. “No, they know we didn’t do it. Think about it, Dave. It happened how many hours ago?”

“Twelve,” he answers, without missing a beat. “Almost.”

“Twelve. Twelve hours ago. They managed to collect their names, where they lived, what they looked like, in twelve hours, not to mention that this broadcast has been going on for at least thirty minutes, maybe longer. Everyone knows that this government is crooked and inefficient, nothing gets done, right?  _And_ for most of that time people have been either panicked and staying at home or sleeping.”

“So you -”

“Yeah. They knew. They must have known. There’s no way they could have collected all that information in twelve hours. Plus who the hell makes up a story like ours just to kill people? There’s no motive. They had to know.”

“So that -”

“Yes. Either information about the planned bombing was leaked to them and they did nothing, or... or they planted it. To blame us.”

“Thanks for interrupting, Jade, I almost embarrassed myself by saying that in about a hundred less words,” Dave snarks.

Jade rolls her eyes.

For all of Jade’s speech you had never stopped watching Karkat. He seemed to get angrier and angrier, a brilliant red blush spreading underneath his skin.

“They want to undo _everything_ ,” he hisses. “We worked for _months_ trying to spread a message and now they’re trying to get rid of it all by painting us as murdering bastards!” He stands, screaming with rage. “Well if they think they’re going to manage that then I’m going to have to shove my fist shoulder deep up their deplorable asses and use them like fucking muppets!”

Karkat kicks the radio into the wall, turns and starts clawing at the mattress. You quickly reach to grab his shoulder and pull him towards you, before he can start really hurting himself.

“We are _not_ going to take this. We are _not_ going to hand ourselves in or just wait until they find us. We are _not_ going to let those braindead cumseeds take away the _one thing_ that is important.”

He sits on your thigh, breathing heavily. His anger seems to have subsided slightly. The rest remain quiet for a while.

“Karkat, you do get what you’re suggesting, right?”

Karkat turns to Dave and scowls. “What?”

“Well. What can we do? Just run? Organise another meeting? Nah, that’s done, it won’t change anything, even if we get back all the people’s trust. They’re trying to ruin us. Violently.”

“So?

“So... What’s the next step? We tried speaking, so now what?”

“Jesus fuck you love to hear yourself talk, don’t you.”

“War.”

You feel Karkat stop breathing for a second. “Oh.”

“If you’re serious, we need to fight. We need to find people who can fight with us, and we need to take this city.”

“No way,” you say, looking at Dave. You feel like laughing again. “We don’t need to fight, or war, or whatever!”

“Well then what do you suggest, John?”

“I don’t know! Just... not that. People have already died for this.”

There’s an uncomfortable lull in conversation at that. Karkat turns to look at you in the eye. He grimaces and turns back around. His hand goes for yours on the mattress and squeezes it. It feels like an apology.

“I’m sorry, John. Like look, I really am, I’m sorry that shithead of a Condesce did all these things to you. But there are things worth fighting for.”

“What do you know about fighting?”

“Wow, what could a Pale Mutt in this world possibly know about fighting?”

You whine, searching your mind for anything else to say.

“But... but we’d just be getting people caught up in it that didn’t want to be. How can we do that? There’ll be more than just one bomb, Dave, if we went to war we’d tear the city apart. People who don’t want anything to do with it wouldn’t be able to escape.”

Dave made an uncomfortable sort of grunt. He looked at Karkat. So did you, and so did Jade. Suddenly he was the decision maker. Suddenly he was the leader.

Karkat shuffled, then turned to look all of you in the eye.

“We can’t step back. We can’t, not after this.” He avoids looking at you. “We need to fight.” He grabs your hand again, and it’s even more like an apology than before. “From this moment on, we are at war.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's Under your Bed over with!! Thank you for sticking with it for so long. I think I am going to write a part 2, it'll probably be longer and darker, and take a lot longer to finish, but hopefully if you liked this you'll stick with me for that too.

**Author's Note:**

> So Under Your Bed Sat The Wolf is part of a two (or three, I haven't decided yet) part series that I want to write and have an intention of carrying on until I either lose motivation or I finish, whichever comes first. I'm not sure how I feel about this chapter, but it's been in the works for so long I thought I may as well post it.


End file.
